The Hills Have Wifi - The story of Airjaldi

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FRIDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2010

THE MINT REPORT

PHOTOGRAPHS BY PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

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Customizing Wi­Fi: AirJaldi CEO Michael Ginguld (left) with Dhondup Namgyal, who oversees the deployment of networks, in McLeodganj, Himachal Pradesh.

THE HILLS HAVE WI­FI B Y K RISH R AGHAV krish.r@livemint.com

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T

his is it. Right here.”

Michael Ginguld, 47, stands on a balcony at the Tibetan Institute for Performing Arts in McLeodganj. It’s a sunny October morning, and a cool wind blows through the town, making the prayer flags on the roof flutter frantically.

Ginguld points at a 5m-high rusted iron pole clamped to the parapet, on which two antennas are wired together through a rectangular blue iron box.

“Half the game—half the problem—is making this installation an economically viable solution,” Ginguld says, over the sound of a melancholic danyen being played downstairs. The “problem” is the future of broadband connectivity in rural India (or the lack thereof), and the “installation” is Ginguld’s solution to it: a business model of low-cost, customized Wi-Fi relays, perfected over six years by AirJaldi, the company he now heads.

Every single house on McLeodganj’s eastern face that is visible from this vantage point has access to broadband thanks to AirJaldi; the network in Dharamshala now reaches about 3,000 computers and over 10,000 people by using 50 such relays.

As of June, AirJaldi has also broken even financially. “After years of figuring it out—operationally, financially, technically—I think we’ve managed to pry loose the rural knot, if you will,” Ginguld says.

AirJaldi started as a non-profit enterprise in 2005, with the aim of providing “viable and sustainable” broadband for rural communities. Both founder Yahel Ben-David and Ginguld were Israelis familiar with Dharamshala, having worked with the Tibetan communityin-exile here since the late 1990s. Ginguld is married to a Tibetan, Tenzin Chokey, and lives in the nearby village of Norbulingka.

“When Yahel called me to work with AirJaldi in 2006, I was with a company in Cambridge, Massachusetts,” Ginguld says. “It didn’t take a lot to convince me.”

In mid-2009, AirJaldi spawned a for-profit arm—Rural Broadband Pvt. Ltd—which offers broadband services on a franchisee model.

They have 15 employees and so far operate three networks—one each in Dharamshala, Tehri-Garhwal and Kumaon.

The ongoing year is the one in which they hope to scale up significantly. When I mention this, Ginguld says: “From your mouth to the ears of God.” Estimates for the number of Indian Internet users are imprecise, but market research firms—from Delhi-based JuxtConsult to Manufacturers’ Association for Information Technology, or MAIT, an apex IT industry body—put it somewhere between 45 million and 60 million people. The figure is simultaneously derided as too high or too low, and asking for reasons for its glacial rate of growth tends to produce vague answers.

But Ginguld says the reason is simple. “It’s devilishly simple, in fact. The cost of reaching the majority of customers in India is not justified by the return on investment using most readily available technologies.” No government scheme or heavy investment, he says, has been able to change that basic fact.

AirJaldi’s model, however, has proven so effective that it is now being adopted by other organizations. A pilot project in Chanderi in Madhya Pradesh, by the Delhi-based Digital Empowerment Founda-

tion (DEF) and the Internet Society, the international standards body, uses relays very much like AirJaldi’s. “This model can connect rural India very well, very fast, instead of waiting several years for fibre-optic cable to be laid,” says Osama Manzar of DEF. “The cost of deployment is remarkably low, and it connects everyone democratically.”

Medium of choice Rural Broadband’s new office is near the dry Dhall Lake, about 3km north-west of McLeodganj, on the first floor of a two-storey mansion called Brenner House. Three dogs—two enthusiastic Apsos, one languid Alsatian—act as sentries. The atmosphere is relaxed: Employees are dressed in jeans and T-shirts, and light music wafts out of laptop speakers.

In Ginguld’s room, where he works with a laptop hooked to a large TFT monitor, he brings up a Google Earth overlay of the Dharamshala area. All the relays have precise place-marks, marked with a portable GPS device. They also have strange names, such as “Rakesh’s aunt” or “Yakob’s garage”.

“There’s a reason the rural is rural,” he says, zooming out to show all of India. As if on cue, there’s a power cut, and his monitor winks out. “See what I mean?” he laughs. “It could be the availability of basic services, the sources of employment, the geography in relation to nearby urban areas—something will be different. If you want to work in rural areas, you have to be mindful of that.”

For AirJaldi, providing connectivity to Dharamshala meant three crucial differences from other loca- The network in tions. The population is dispersed over a larger area, Dharamshala the hills make for less “convenient” topography, and the people, on average, have a lower ability to pay for now reaches about services. “So you have a situation here where you’re 3,000 computers facing a high cost structure for a low number of cusand over 10,000 tomers,” Ginguld says.

The first challenge was to choose the right technol- people by using ogy, and Ginguld and Ben-David considered almost 50 relays all of them. VSAT devices (similar to antennas used for dish-based television) were one option, but the antennas were costly and the advantages to scale were few if any.

Dongles and GPRS were too closely tied to large telecom companies for a small start-up to work with, and technologies such as WiMax were years away from being viable.

The most likely alternative was DSL/ADSL, which provides connectivity through telephone wires. It’s the technology favoured by most Internet providers, but it breaks down in rural areas for a number of reasons.

“Most of India, on average, is about 40km away from the fibre-optic backbone that connects to the global Web,” Ginguld says. “From this backbone, you need to extend your wires to individual clients with equipment, which is where the problem starts.”

This is the so-called “last-mile problem”. Extending the backbone requires setting up costly base stations or exchanges, and Ginguld’s experience with copper wiring (expensive, but cheaper than laying new fibre-optic) proved disastrous in Dharamshala. “They’re always dug up...and sold. It’s crazy.”

That left Wi-Fi, which comes with distinct advantages. It’s unliTURN TO PAGE S5®

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THE MINT REPORT

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2010

Wireless 108

Getting wired: Students at the Tibetan Children’s Village school near McLeodganj, Dharamshala, access the Internet through a computer connected via AirJaldi’s wireless broadband network. ® FROM PAGE S4

censed spectrum and so doesn’t pose a huge entry barrier, unlike 3G or GPRS. It’s been around for a decade, leading to a proliferation of available devices and brands. The open-source community has also dabbled extensively in it, creating a suite of free software. Most of AirJaldi’s work, Ginguld says, was made possible by “standing on the shoulders of these open-source giants”.

But the use of Wi-Fi is tricky. Network complexity increases exponentially with the number of nodes created, so the use of a proper network structure, or topology, is crucial.

Therein lies AirJaldi’s significant point of difference, in creating what it calls “retail ecologies”. If you think of bandwidth as a commodity, AirJaldi creates a dense network of kirana stores and pushcarts that distribute this commodity, instead of only the exclusive boutiques that other companies favour. The kirana stores are the antenna/relay installations. “Where their last mile ends, ours begins,” Ginguld says. “Today’s end-point...could be tomorrow’s hub, which connects more people beyond that location.”

AirJaldi uses what’s called a mesh network, consisting of many small, interconnected hubs. All it needs in this situation are a few anchor customers—banks or educational institutions, for example, that can act as primary hubs in a rural area. Ginguld reckons three anchor customers are adequate to start services, with an initial investment of `5-10 lakh (“back of the envelope figures, of course”). Such a service can break even in 24 months, with profits showing up within the third year.

AirJaldi’s Garhwal network, for instance, grew out of a project with IFMR, a microfinance advocacy trust, and it now spans 50km. “They really came through for us,” says Anupama Joshi at IFMR. “The terrain was such a major challenge, but they managed it—it’s a real boon for us, and the villages.” She admits a little inconsistency in speeds, but AirJaldi’s “prompt service” makes up for it, she says.

Most work at AirJaldi seems to get done in the following manner.

Ginguld receives a phone call from clients or partners, gives them an assurance of action, hangs up, and shouts “Dhonnaaam!” across the office.

“Dhonam” is Dhondup Namgyal, a portly 30-year-old Tibetan with spiked hair, a gold chain, and a checked shirt with its first two buttons left open. He is AirJaldi’s manager for deployment—the man in charge of building a new network from the ground up. “Did you know Richard Gere is an AirJaldi user?” is how Namgyal introduces himself.

Next to Ginguld’s room in Brenner House is a larger one that serves as workshop and geek hangout. The laptops here proudly display their “Ubuntu” stickers next to their “Free Tibet” ones. One employee is watching a DIY tutorial, while another is checking Gizmodo, the tech blog.

Routers in varying stages of modification lie everywhere, and Namgyal is rooting through some of AirJaldi’s unique customized equipment. “This is the one that started it all—the Linksys WRT54GL,” Dhonam says, holding up a blue-black router.

The WRT54GL was one of the earliest mass-market wireless routers and a favourite with the hacking community. Namgyal’s team took it apart, swapping the onboard proprietary software for their own open-source variant and reinstalling the circuit board in large, distinctive blue iron boxes. They’re also constantly on the lookout for newer equipment; the latest routers they use, shaped like lightsaber handles, need much less fiddling.

AirJaldi’s engineering is done by young local employees, most of whom are either trained by or teach at AirJaldi’s Network Academy, which conducts a Wireless 108 course in basic networking. Academy graduates are comfortable with jargon and have a breezy confidence with the monitoring software AirJaldi uses.

“After Dharamshala, I think building these networks elsewhere is easy,” says 28-year-old Tenzin Gompo, AirJaldi’s system administrator and a lecturer at the academy. When we meet, Gompo is attending a hacker’s conference; Tibetan networks in the area, including AirJaldi, are frequent targets for Chinese hackers.

In other ways too, Dharamshala is a challenging test bed for technology. It gets three months of heavy rain, with generous lashings of thunder and lightning, followed by a brutally cold winter. The power supply is dodgy at best, and then there are the numerous, wireless network-hating monkeys who wreck any open equipment. AirJaldi’s installations needed to be impervious to all these.

The heavy-duty iron boxes have a sliding design, making them monkey-proof and easily operable by a person hanging from a 6mhigh pole. The installations themselves are sometimes surrounded by coils of barbed wire. Each relay consumes about 25W of power, the equivalent of one CFL bulb, and they’re powered by solar panels, which prove more economical than the cost of frequent equipment failure due to power surges. “We’re at a stage where a single relay costs us about `40,000-60,000 with solar power, or `20,000-40,000 without,” Namgyal says.

Namgyal is the person visible in almost all of AirJaldi’s photographs—climbing precariously perched relays, scoping out remote locations, or braving monkeys. He’s just back from laying new relays in AirJaldi’s network in Garhwal. “It took us about a week—putting in a cement base, installing the pole, calibrating the equipment,” he says.

Keeping it all together is the Network Operating Centre (NOC), operating out of a small room in the Tibetan Children’s Village, a nearby residential school. The NOC can be monitored remotely, and when accessed, shows a top-down view of the whole operation—working relays in green, defunct ones in red. From this view, the Dharamshala network seems to be shaped like a spreadeagled Fido Dido.

Hunger for bandwidth From every McLeodganj rooftop, you can spot at least 18 large, ungainly telephone towers. There are at least as many AirJaldi towers in the same area, but they seem to blend into the structure of the city, morphing into view only if you know where to look. Everything about AirJaldi has an air of minimalism about it, and Ginguld likes to say that it’s impressive how unimpressive their equipment is. “I hope we’ll be remembered for adding some beauty to this place, not as someone who bought the silicon valleys of Pamela Anderson to innocent Dharamshala,” Ginguld says. For him, the Internet is a basic freedom—as important as security, water or electricity.

AirJaldi is now in the process of starting new networks in three other locations, with more under consideration. “I’m under no illusion that what we do is magic or rocket science,” Ginguld says. “It’s the result of much time and effort. Anyone willing to put in what we have can replicate what we do.”

Innovation centre: Ginguld works on an antenna at AirJaldi’s office near Dhall Lake.

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SLIDESHOW

Watch a narrated slideshow that takes a behind­the­ scenes look at AirJaldi’s community Wi­Fi project at www.livemint.com/airjaldi.htm