Low-cost sustainable wireless Internet service for rural areas

Deploying and maintaining an Internet service in remote rural and mountainous areas is a challenging task specifically in developing countries. In this paper, we present a study to realize a low-cost sustainable Wireless Internet Service Provider (ISP) built for rural areas of developing countries. There was no Internet access in the area prior to this project. The solution consists of a Wi-Fi based networking system that covers three remote far away villages (Koi-Barmol, Piple and Baboozo) in the Pakistani province of Khyber Pukhtunkhwa. The contributions of this study include the details of step-by-step design, implementation and the issues faced to the rural WISP during long-term operation with recommendations to mitigate these issues. Apart from sharing practical insights we also make technical contributions in the form of throughput and latency analysis of IEEE 802.11n with the proprietary TDMA MAC protocol called airMAX over long-distance point-to-point links. We hope that the study will help people to quickly built and deploy a low-cost sustainable Internet service in the remote rural areas using off-the-shelf devices.