Today is World WiFi Day. So I thought I will write down my experience with WiFi, not about my research but how I learnt about the condition of rural India.
Pravin Bhagwat had joined the faculty of CSE Department at IIT Kanpur in 2001. He was a world renowned expert in WiFi, having worked on Wireless LAN communication technologies for some years even before WiFi was standardized. Government of India had set up an organization called Media Lab Asia in collaboration with Media Lab, MIT, USA. And they were very excited about this wireless technology (which at that time was banned in India, but there were talks of opening it up). Pravin suggested that we set up the World's longest multi-hop WiFi network from IIT Kanpur to Lucknow, primarily as a technology demonstration initially, and later, we may tweak the protocol to improve the efficiency of multi-hop access (which was later taken up by Prof. Bhaskaran Raman). I resisted. I had read a paper which essentially said that WiFi performance in multi-hop network would be extremely poor. But he too had read that paper, he knew the authors, and he was convinced that the simulation software they had used didn't implement the protocol correctly. Still, having grown up in a resource-starved environment, this was too much of a risk. I suggested that we go for making IITK as the first WiFi enabled campus in the country (whenever WiFi is legalized), and use multi-hop links as part of campus network. But he was insistent, and I am glad that he was. Pravin has always been a big vision guy.
We finally did set up that network. But this blog is not about the technical challenges, but experiences gained. One of our towers was in Village Sarauhan in District Unnao. The village was about 15 KM from Kanpur-Lucknow highway, and once you went there, the time stood still. So near a major national highway, but still there was no connectivity. While mobile communication was in its infancy all over the country, there was no PCO (the ubiquitous Public Call Office in those days, from where you could make phone calls to anywhere in the world at price fixed by BSNL) either. If a poor man had to make a phone call to his son working in Mumbai, he had to walk about an hour to get to the nearest PCO, stand in a long queue, make a phone call to Mumbai to just tell the other guy that he will call again in half an hour and let his son be available on the phone in Mumbai. After that, he will stand in the queue again, and in about half an hour, make that second phone call. Due to a lot of crowd, the operator would restrict all calls to 3 minutes, and also charge much more than the BSNL price. And one hour walk back. So a 3-minute phone call had costed him not just inflated charges of two phone calls, but also his half day's wages. This was the situation in a village which was well connected by road, and not too far from a national highway in a somewhat urbanized district. Farming land was aplenty and productive and the village wasn't among the poorest for sure. And yet, the phone technology hadn't reached there. After we set up our system and provided WiFi access to the village, we also setup a VoIP call from there to IITK, and enabled its connection to the telephone network through IITK's exchange. So whenever anyone from our team would be in the village, we will let them make a few phone calls. Our project ended up paying a few rupees for each phone call, but they saved more than hundred rupees on each call. We were heroes in that village. Of course, after some time, the phone technology did reach there. This really opened our eyes to the possibilities, and not just our group but other groups in Media Lab Asia. Our assumption that some basic technology is available everywhere and our products and services have to be built on top of that was so completely wrong.
The second interesting experience was in setting up an Internet access shop in a village close to IITK, named Mandhana. We had a PC and a printer there, with WiFi providing connectivity to IITK network and onward to Internet. We would provide Internet access to villagers at very cheap rates, and yet no one would want to access it. They would want to do some activities and wanted to know the cost for them. For example, the day any exam result was being declared, they would not mind paying 3 rupees for downloading their result and taking a print out, which would be a 1-2 minute activity, but if we were to charge 10 rupees per hour in which they could check the result of the whole village, that was unacceptable. So we couldn't sell Internet access as a service even at a very low price, but we could sell "get your score" service, or "book a train ticket" service, or "get a government form" service even at a significantly higher per minute price, if it came with the guarantee that if the service didn't get completed, they won't have to pay. And in our market surveys, it turned out that the price we could charge was roughly equal to the transportation cost they would have to incur to get that service in person. So we could have charged much more and they would have still preferred to come to our shop than take a tempo to the city. This was another great learning. The service that you sell has to be the service that your customer understands and not what you can sell easily. And the price that you can charge has to be linked with the value that he gets out of that service, and not necessarily linked to the cost of providing that service.
While I am at it, may be I should also add the story of the tiny part I played in making WiFi legal in India. There was a conference in Delhi, and on the sidelines, Media Lab Asia organized a demo of its projects being done by various IITs. The Minister of Communication and Information Technology, (Late) Mr. Pramod Mahajan, was supposed to see all the demos. We had all reached a day earlier and put up everything and waiting for him the next day. He did enter the room, only to apologize that he was very busy, had some other pressing engagement and won't be able to see the demos. I was among the first one in the room. I went to him, told him that all of us have been away from our office for 2-3 days to show this demo, and he should find at least 30 minutes to quickly go over the demos. Everyone was shocked that even after a minister has been so kind to be apologetic, here is a professor who is insisting that he sees the demo. Apparently that meant I had no respect for Minister's time. But he was a perfect gent (otherwise, he would not have even come to the room to apologize), and agreed to spend 30 minutes.
My demo was simple (and in today's technology, laughable). There were two imported laptops with WiFi (laptops sold in India were not allowed to have WiFi) and I could transfer a file from one to the other. If he had time, I had planned to show our plans for this large WiFi network. But this file transfer was enough in the situation. He seemed impressed and mentioned that a wireless technology would be very useful in many applications. I told him that for this demo, the police could put me behind bars, as the use of WiFi was illegal. I also told him that only India and Pakistan have not made this band freely available for public use. (I am sure North Korea also didn't allow that, but hey Pakistan works better in any such argument.) IIT Kanpur received temporary permission to use WiFi for our Media Lab Asia projects within days, and the use of ISM band (in which WiFi operates) without license for anyone in India happened a few months later. This was anyway under consideration, but this incident added to the pressure to do it.
Happy WiFi Day to all.
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