Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

1. Six days with the Akshaya project: day 1: overview
2. Day 2: technology
3. Day 3: entrepreneurs
4. Day 4: promotion
5. Day 5: training
6. Day 6: conclusions

The Akshaya project uses a combination of various wireless technologies to provide internet access to 3,500 square kilometers of rural areas in the rugged terrains of Malappuram, a hilly district in the Kerala state of India.

It is the world’s biggest rural wireless network.

The technology is provided and managed by a private company from India, Tulip IT, using gear from a variety of other companies (Wi-Lan supplied base stations, AirSpan provided WIPLL systems).

The network.

The network is set up like this:

1. A central NOC is connected to the net and provides bandwidth. They have routers, a firewall. All network traffic flows through this central access point.
2. Next to the NOC stands a radiotower that provides wireless internet access to 17 POPs (Point Of Presence)
3. Each POP is a radiotower on a hill. It provides access to local Akshaya centers, and also relays access through to the next POP.

A sketch I made might help. The first two sketches show the same thing from a different perspective: the central NOC and POP towers on hills, and then the Akshaya centers around a POP tower.

This is a sketch of the actual network with some example distances. The nodes are POPs, the numbers next to the nodes are the amount of Akshaya centers connected to that POP.

The whole network uses two different radio systems:

1. VINE technology with 2 Wi-LAN antennas on each POP tower (one forward and one backward) that connect POPs and create a backbone
2. 4 WIPLL antennas on each POP provide 360 degrees access to the Akshaya centers around it.

Versatile Intelligent Network (VINE).

The backbone, consisting of the POP towers, uses VINE technology. Each tower has a radio with two Wi-Lan antennas (one forward, one backward), that send a narrow, line-of-sight radio beam to the next POP antenna (at 2.4GHz frequency). If they ever need to double their maximum throughput of 8Mbps, they just have to add 2 more antennas to each tower.

The network can grow nicely as well - any POP can become a repeater.

Local Akshaya centers can also be equipped with a VINE radio and thus become a POP itself. These are called subPOPs.

Wireless IP in Local Loop (WipLL)

Each POP also contains a radio that provides line-of-sight access (maximum 2Mbps) to the Akshaya centers 360 degrees around it. It uses 4 antennas and WipLL technology. WipLL is based on Multipoint Microwave Distribution System.

Network Operating Center (NOC).

The NOC manages bandwidth and is connected to an 8Mbps pipe. They have gateway routers, caching servers and a firewall. It is manned 24-hours by two engineers. The center provides wireless access to 7 (is this correct?) POP towers around it, which in turn relay the signal to POP towers further afield.

The firewall in the NOC currently blocks 100,000 websites, almost all porn sites. In the traditional muslim area they are rolling this project out, it is important to avoid a schandal that might turn people away from the centers for a long time to come. Entrepreneurs are asked to report sites that should be blocked.

The NOC building.

The NOC antenna.

Inside the NOC.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 23rd, 2004 at 2:24 pm and is filed under India trip 2004. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.