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title
[Don Means] Hello everyone. Welcome to
Part 37 of our series on, what is a library if the building is closed? Now as Libraries
in Recovery we hope, we presume, we strive for today's uh session is about community networks
do they work? We'll hear about that very soon we started these as most of you will know uh
in March right after the pandemic was declared when this question about you know how what are we
what's going on how we respond uh how do we react uh and that question about now okay what what
is a library or any institution as far as that goes that's a public space, what does it mean
if the if the facility itself is unavailable? And that uh set up a number of really interesting
questions and certain aspects of that question like internet access and digital services,
physical materials, and social infrastructure which is a very important role for libraries
uh increasingly so and it has just rolled on from there with we've had over 4,000
registrations for the series and some 90 speakers holding forth on really interesting uh stuff
so we are the Gigabit Libraries Network, my name is Don Means.
We're producing this
series in a partnership with uh IFLA the International Federation of Library Associations
and Institutions with Stephen Wyber the Head of Public Policy for IFLA at the controls in the
Netherlands uh our our session sponsor is the uh DC Chapter of the Internet Society I hope uh
Dustin is on somewhere we're gonna ask him to say something for us and our series sponsor
this quarter is Adapt from a technology company building radios in the in the TV bands that has
been a supplier a number of projects that we're involved in so these are our two speakers
we're so uh happy to have Chris Mitchell and and Dr.
Belur are with us uh to talk about
community networks they're both extremely accomplished in this area and it's one of the one
of the important approaches to this universal uh access or at least public access, we've talked
about this in terms of a a three-part approach of hubs, community hubs like libraries where people
can go community networks, which is a growing phenomenon that we'll hear more about where people
who are living in places that are unserved or underserved, uh have decided not to just wait for
the cavalry to come which it looks like it will never come because it hasn't already come and
that's because of the the market assessment uh for these for these communities is unprofitable
and yet that is just unacceptable to a lot of people for obvious reasons so we'll get into that
in a moment um first we're going to return to our COVID report that's what really generated
this whole uh series in the first place was the pandemic and uh this is the latest data which
is just stunning this graph is just remarkable.
I mean we were we were kind of panicky there in the
spring when the cases were hitting 60,000 a day uh I'm sorry in the summer when they were
crossing 60,000 a day we were kind of freaking out it trailed off a bit and then it just hockey
sticked up for the end of the year and peaking uh I think on January 6 or something
like that at right at 300,000 cases. So, a shocking number of people have succumbed the
U.S. still leads the world and it's exceptionalism around this with roughly 20 to 25 percent of cases
and and deaths but happily we're on the way down uh it's just phenomenal uh change of direction.
No one is really explaining this other than well people are trying to finally getting the
message and you know putting masks on well thank you everybody uh extraordinary news of vaccines, I
mean it hasn't been a full year since the pandemic was declared and there are effective vaccines out
there.
The issue of course that the variants maybe alter that that story a bit and we just don't yet
know how how much but the fact that they do exist I mean there's still no vaccine for for HIV and
that's typical with these viruses it's just really an extraordinary accomplishment in the face of
this threat which of course we are contributing to but not to get too uh comfortable here uh
from Larry Brilliant uh uh world-renowned epidemiologist uh that makes this point that no
we're not safe, until everybody's safe because the reason of these variants is that that's what
viruses do they they mutate uh in response to their environment they're trying to survive
like every other organism and so they change uh and and as they do they're spawning these
variants and as long as they're out there in large numbers then that's what they will do and so this
is the point I think here that nobody uh Larry was um one of the uh the team that actually eradicated
smallpox tracked down and and uh and and stopped it finally after all those uh centuries and
he's uh he's a guy to watch and listen to. Of course this is not our only disaster, we've
we've touched on this we've got we've got serious uh extreme weather events driven by climate change
uh out here in California this is our flavor uh but you know the middle of the country just 40
percent of the corn crop in Iowa was flattened in an afternoon because this uh enormous winds
we had a hurricane season that you know was just completely unprecedented and here we had an
event where two of them landed at the same time virtually at the same time I mean that's never
happened so the point of that all is we are in a different environment and it may make the pandemic
look like a picnic before this thing is over uh here's a new player on the on the
scene of weather disasters, extreme cold, prolonged cold Texas is frozen and there are
a lot of infrastructure lessons we might get into at some point but not today.
We wish the
Texans luck in thawing out and recovering. We're going to open uh with a short presentation
on uh this comment that Gigabit Libraries has filed in response to the the petition seeking
relief from the Wireline Competition Bureau at the FCC that restricts the anchor institutions under
e-rate libraries and schools from extending uh connectivity beyond the property in the building
and with us to talk about that that filing is uh Steven Augustino from Kelley Drye a leading uh
DC law firm that that is extremely knowledgeable and specialized in this and helped us prepare
this this uh filing. So Steve welcome, can you tell us kind of I mean we wrote this but
you know can you kind of tell us the background and what this particular filing may mean
and and where you think it's going to go? [Steven Augustino] Sure thing Don thank you
for that, thank you for the introduction. You know, for the benefit of those it's my first
time on this so for the benefit of everybody um I am as don said an attorney at Kelley, Drye and
Warren in Washington DC we do a lot of things including federal universal service fund work.
So,
I put in the chat two documents for you links to some relevant information I'll also after I finish
my presentation, put my own contact information in there in case you want to follow up with me as
well but I'm assuming everybody knows about the e-rate program, long-standing program very
successful program providing funding for schools and libraries for broadband services. As a result
of the COVID pandemic the FCC issued a number of waivers of its rules over the past year or so
dealing with filing deadlines, filing windows exemptions to the gift rules and other things to
allow schools and libraries to proceed as much as possible um on a normal process in a very abnormal
environment here um there also in the last month has been a change in the administration
and the the leadership at the FCC, came with the change in the in the presidency, the new
acting chairwoman is a champion of e-rate she was involved in the original passage of the rules
um of the statute rather and has been very active while at the FCC on this so people are expecting
a much more open um commission looking at e-rate issues and the broadband issues, in
particular one of her main issues has been the so-called homework gap that is the problem
of students not having access to internet at home to do things like homework and research
etc when they have it at the school itself um the several parties have come forward and
asked the FCC to adopt interim waivers relating to this homework gap problem or
relating more specifically to providing remote learning services for students and Shelby, a
organization of schools and healthcare and library entities filed one of the petitions uh the New
Mexico board of education filed another one and Colorado school interests filed a third so the
FCC has asked for comment on this on an expedited basis uh with the expectation that they will grant
a a some kind of a waiver to allow broadband, funding for broadband uses in remote learning um
on behalf of the Gigabit Libraries Network we pro provided comments and I put a link into the
comments um in the chat as well on this, we were one of about 110 parties that filed comments
on this um the request received quite a lot of support um and some discussions at the margin
about how to make changes to it, which I can talk about if we have time um the main thing for us
in our filing and for Gigabit Libraries Network was to um provide a background and justification
for the commission to continue to treat schools and libraries the same on this program and so
we talked about the ways in which libraries are also contributing to remote learning and
providing remote access opportunities for students and for the community in this time frame.
The three major recommendations that we had are on the screen here as Don has them so, we supported
the waivers we supported allowing um in the use of off-campus uses of broadband in the
circumstances um we talked about ways in which schools and libraries collaborate together or can
collaborate together to provide a very effective learning environment for the for k-12 students as
well as for the public at large.
We asked that the commission explicitly allowed public libraries to
extend their access beyond the physical building using wi-fi hotspots, mobile kiosks, bookmobiles
etc and then we reminded the commission that 10 years ago they had set forth 11 years ago now
they had set forth a goal of having a gigabit of internet into every library so fiber to the
library was the goal there and that goal has not been accomplished it is an incomplete
access to it.
So those were the comments on it I I will say that in terms of timing on
this I expect the commission will allow immediate use for funding to cover remote uses,
it will take them a little bit of time to get the rule out there but it's likely to be a waiver it
may go into effect you know within the next three to six weeks um depending upon the the overall
uh how quickly the commission can act on this but it does appear that there will be something
that is granted here and we are hopeful that it will recognize libraries and allow for a
broad role for libraries as well and I'll pause there Don and let's just ask if people
have questions or want other information. [Don Means] That's great Steve and uh and
thank you for the support on this it's it's not the most uh straightforward process to
file comments or anything else it's not terribly complicated but there are definitely some some
uh procedures and strategies for expressing your ideas uh on uh these notices uh but they are
open so I have a question for you Steve, uh do these get read? What's, you know, how
what's the real process behind how these are treated by the FCC? You're being recorded
of course, so speak carefully.
[laughter] [Steven Augustino] Every single word of every
document is read thoroughly very thoroughly. This is an expedited proceeding um there were
like I said 110 comments reply comments are due on Tuesday um so it it's hard for interested
parties to make sure they read everything that's out there. There is a team of staff that
will read everything and that digests it and makes recommendations uh to the commission
uh this will either require the Bureau Chief to grant the waiver and probably more likely it's
gonna require all five of the commissioners to consider an order um and to to vote on that so
there are many other people that can be you know met with they will not read the entire record but
they will have summaries and things available and they do take meetings on it so how quickly they
act on this is a is a question and I see some um you know some traffic in the chat on that
I'll try to respond to some of the stuff if I can after I finish speaking.
[Don Means] Yeah, but how about uh Bob Boker's comment there that yes he may
wait for uh action on the Shelby uh petition pending the the new e-rate legislation.
[Steven Augustino] um It's certainly possible, I mean there's you know there's an emergency
broadband benefit which the commission is also working on and they have to figure out how to
make that consistent with this um and then this draft legislation is talking about as much as
up to 7.6 billion dollars in additional funding for um e-rate uses so um yeah I think there's a
concern about not making the funding duplicative and that might cause them to to
see how other things shake out. [Don Means] Right, um uh Seth thank you.
Seth's
asking if the waiver applies to libraries, that's the point here that we're trying to make to
be explicit uh about that usually these uh rulings are expressed under e-rate you know schools
and libraries, libraries kind of treat it as a suffix to schools uh and that has led to a number
of sort of ambiguities in the in the regulations is what applies or doesn't apply to a library that
does to a school and and so what you'll read if you actually go to this as you'll see we've we're
calling for that to be explicitly pointed out and made clear to everyone among these other
things and to Steve's point we have a window of replies to these comments and we would invite
you to reply uh I think that link was in the chat uh I don't know if the if that link is active
on your screen now that we've got at the bottom of the slide it shows it's active on mine but I
don't know, I'll put it in the chat anyway so we uh whoops we encourage everyone to uh to
check in on that and and weigh in on that and and you have until Tuesday to do that
so uh thank you Steve, it's been great. [Steven Augustino] Yeah.
[Don Means]Last word? [Steven Augustino] Yeah one just one quick
clarification, letters will be accepted in the docket even past Tuesday so
[Don Means] Okay, good point, good point.
All right.
[Steven Augustino] That's real helpful. [Don Means] Great, okay well uh before we get to
our um our guest speakers uh we wanted to give uh our sponsor the Internet Society or rather
the Washington DC Chapter of the Internet Society a chance to say hello we
wanted to thank them for their for their support and for all their great work um
we have Dustin Loup on uh Dustin are you there? [Dustin Loup] Hey yeah, I am.
[Don Means] Alright, good welcome Dustin uh the Internet Society if people may not know, is one
of the leading champions for community networking uh solutions around uh well the whole world so
Dustin uh thanks for the support and and tell us something about what you're doing there in DC.
[Dustin Loup] yeah absolutely thank you Don for this opportunity um you know we're thrilled to
be able to sponsor the great work that you're doing with these ongoing calls and uh glad to
see it still going strong after all this time um and so just to take a step back the internet
society is a global organization and it has chapters all over the world that uh carry out
work in line with this shared vision that uh we want a strong internet so we promote things like
security and trustworthiness um but we also want to grow the internet and that's where a lot of
this work comes into play uh making sure that the internet is extended to ideally everybody,
right? and so um our abilities to support this series and some of our work was made possible
by a grant from the Internet Society Foundation, which provides a lot of funding for connectivity
and other related initiatives um and the grant that we got was had two objectives in mind.
The
first was to work with the Gigabit Libraries Network and the Georgia Public Library service to
expand existing library infrastructure to provide wi-fi access via these neighborhood library access
stations or kiosks and in doing so better serve the community's connectivity needs um so in an
in addition to extending access through this this project um it'll also serve as a pilot and
hopefully produce a case study that can provide a framework for other libraries both in Georgia and
elsewhere so through through this partnership with Gigabit Libraries Network and the Georgia
Public Library service we are connected with a library in Vidalia, Georgia to roll out a
tv white space solution in their community due to some scheduled renovations that
they're building it's actually going to be deployed in a nearby town but will
be equally as impactful if not greater and so we're looking forward to watching this roll
out and through the grant we're able to fund the equipment and the installation fees, which
I'll touch a little bit on in just a second but the the other objective that I mentioned is
to use this pilot project in addition to the DC Chapters work in establishing a community network
in Baltimore as well as similar work from other chapters to start to form a network focused on
supporting community-driven connectivity efforts and right now we're just in the process of
forming a hub of sorts that can share resources, opportunities, develop case studies
things like that as well as convening events webinars maybe putting on briefings for
policy makers and mobilizing around different calls to action, such as like the public comment
opportunities that were just discussed as well as other things like that um initially it'll be
focused in the north American region and um and with an emphasis on community-driven efforts so
things through community networks, libraries, community centers similar organizations like that
um but it's really open to anybody and ideally would grow through the network that we have at
the internet society to have a larger footprint but wanted to start with it being a little
bit more focused and just to kind of share an example of why this is important to us, in this
project that we're doing in Georgia we're actually we have the equipment we have the location we
have the funding um but we're having a little bit and and they're having a little bit of
trouble finding somebody that can actually um install the equipment for them and
provide that service and so having a network that we could tap into to say like,
hey does anybody know somebody in Georgia that could help install this equipment we have
funding for it we have everything that we need we just need somebody to actually do it that's
in that region and so the opportunity to tap into those kinds of networks is an additional
example of what we're hoping to do with that so um that that's really all I wanted to say.
[Don Means] Great Dustin, no really I appreciate that.
I know the these projects are always a
challenge uh I would nominate uh the Information Technology Disaster Resource Center for uh
exactly that kind of talent to set that up and uh Joe Hill is there. He's he's been a
partner with us on projects and they've got a national network of 2,000 engineers volunteers
that are able to go in that mostly focus on disaster but they help anchor institutions all
over the place. So we'll hook up with them and see if we can get them on the case thank you again for
the for the sponsorship and appearing today and we'll look forward to doing more uh as we go along
in this, so let's get to our our main event here uh and we're gonna ask Chris Mitchell uh of
ILSR uh to lead off and talk about his work and community networking and
and and first tell us Chris, what does self-reliance mean? I mean I think
everybody understands the term but in this context you know could you kind of anchor us in that?
[Chris Mitchell] Sure Don, thank you. [Don Means] You're welcome.
[Chris Mitchell] um I I really appreciate your work, I'm a fan of libraries one of our founders
um 47 years ago David Morris, is a huge supporter of the library system um we believe that libraries
are just an incredibly important part of open society.
Um self-reliance to me um is actually
juxtaposed with um self-sufficiency in that um they're quite different um self-sufficiency is
sort of this idea of doing everything yourself, self-reliance is more about recognizing where
you can do things yourself and and I think you know in the situation for instance in Texas it
would be having systems that are more resilient and better able to break down gracefully. To some
extent within a community it means being cognizant of where your resources are going you know rather
than being dependent on multinational corporations being more focused on local jobs, local businesses
uh those sorts of things so I mean this is something that gets deep into the details. I
run the community broadband networks program deeply appreciate your promotion to president Don
but I'm actually not in charge of the institute, I've just run a program within it um so
um I wanted to I also want to say I really I'm glad that internet society is here internet
society recently sponsored a paper that and work that we did in which we detailed case studies
of tribal networks that are community networks um and we compiled a list of all of the known
tribal networks in the u.s when we recently made that public we're doing more work
on on tribal community networks as well and also i'm excited to hear Sarbane
after this i've run into APC a few times. I really respect the work
that they do around the world. Most of my experience with community networks
is quite limited to the United States and has limited um you know has to be carefully
shared elsewhere just because we have different customs and laws that give more flexibility
to localities than many parts of the world do. So, I wanted to actually have something here
and I'll throw in the chat room a link that I encourage people to check out later if they
find this interesting but as we think about why community networks and um one of the
things I wanted to respond to Don, is that yes absolutely community networks work.
Now we
just have to define what work means [laughter] because um they they're tasked with different
things. Different communities might have much different goals as what they get from them but
I think it's worth thinking about this in in a sort of thought experiment which is that we
have a tremendous problem with homelessness in many parts of the United States. Nobody goes to
homebuilders and says hey why aren't you building homes for these homeless people right and yet
we have problems with internet access and people go to Comcast and AT&T and say hey how come you
haven't solved this problem, right? We think of it as an internet access problem and it's not,
it's a problem that has deeper social roots, it's deeply connected to poverty and the mere
fact that some companies have networks that are in these areas actually does not necessarily
make them well suited to solve these problems and I would argue that institutions like
libraries are actually much better suited um in the longer term to make sure that people
are having the kind of access that they need so I try to get into that in this
longer article that I just put a link to I also wanted to say that I think
this is an audience I may appreciate um if we move away from sort of thinking about
infrastructure of community networks for a second people like the National Digital Inclusion
Alliance have done really great work in noting that solving broadband means not just
providing infrastructure but actually training and it has to be training that comes from people
that are trusted in the community.
We've just seen a really fantastic experiment um Alabama used
its Cares Act money to do a massive program with subsidies to provide internet access to families
across Alabama and I think it is broadly considered to have been not a success and I don't
know I would call it a failure but people are very frustrated at the level of uptake and I think one
way to think about this and I I think Alabama and working with CTC, Joanne Hovis who cared a
lot about trying to make this program work, they've learned lessons but if we were to just
imagine for a second what would your reaction be upon getting a flyer in the mail about getting
free internet access. I think you'd probably throw it away like I would um and and many people um are
not just going to learn about these programs so easily, they need to hear about it from a trusted
source, which I think means libraries and school systems and so as we see evidence coming out
about how Alabama did with the first significant large-scale effort to get um subsidies out to
take advantage of existing networks i think one of the lessons is that we really need libraries
and school districts to be much more involved in in these programs to have them be successful.
So, with a little bit of the time I have left I really want to make sure we have time for Q and A
so I'm going to skip over this pretty quickly and if people want more information we can talk about
it and I'm gonna also follow up later offline. Right now we're seeing several cities building
what some call gap networks and some I think of as a life raft network, which is often a
free network often using wireless technologies to try to bring some level of access to
people who currently do not subscribe uh but may already have a device or there might
be another program to help take care of that um Tucson is actually doing this and we just
wrote about it on our site communitynetworks.org and what's interesting to me is actually the
incumbent providers are fighting very hard against this.
Tucson is not trying to take over any of
their market share, it is not threatening them in any way, it is trying to provide a free
service to kids and seniors that do not have it and they are reacting as though Bernie Sanders
has come to town and attempted to nationalize the entire city um private industry um and I I find
that dismaying I worry that we're going to see more of those kinds of reactions to some of this
so I wanted to put that out there as a warning but we are seeing cities like San Antonio, Tucson
a lot of school districts using a system called CBRS and I wanted to note why I think that's
important why they're using this technology. Without getting too deep into it CBRS is a
relatively new approach that offers a lot of interesting flexibility one of the chief benefits
is that if you want to deliver a high quality connection to people's homes for instance using
wi-fi technology you're gonna have trouble putting transmitters in the streets that will penetrate
into the home and deliver a high quality signal which means if you really want to get a high
quality signal you would have to send someone to every home to put a receiver or transmitter
on that home or premise that's actually more feasible in larger apartment buildings and
things like that but as you're dealing with single family homes it's very challenging and
labor intensive.
CBRS offers an opportunity to not have to do that because it it allows you
to send out a signal and from the way that we looked at it in in St Paul Minnesota as we've been
experimenting and just doing as estimates of what it would cost to do this you put it on a four or
five story building for instance sort of above the tree canopy and you can offer a signal for
perhaps five or six blocks, roughly half a mile, pretty strong signal to hundreds of end users
possibly more than a thousand depending on different assumptions and what you're willing to
do in terms of a trade-off of devices and you do not have to put devices inside every or on every
home, you can give people a puck type device that they will bring home that turns the CBRS magic
into wi-fi magic and then um you don't actually have to send someone into the home to install
things and that takes a lot of operating costs off the table, it really makes this kind of work
better.
So we're seeing a lot of these experiments I mean I think I read somewhere that we're seeing
10,000 CBRS networks being built right now. Some small fraction of those are being built by groups
and sort of in the public interest or libraries um our estimates is that you know for the system
that we were looking at you have a couple of different costs. One is to get fiber to the
roof which will which will then power the system and uh for where we were looking we thought we
could do that for less than ten thousand dollars um because we had fiber very nearby and so um if
you have to move fiber a significant amount that itself could be $100, $200,000 or more um but you
want to get a high source of bandwidth to the roof you need a 20 amp power circuit which shouldn't
be that expensive and then you can put up on the order of a hundred and fifty thousand two hundred
thousand dollars if I remember correctly worth of CBRS that's like a five-year investment basically
um that that equipment would be expected to last, gives you 360 degrees of of transmitting and
then devices that are on the order of two or three hundred dollars per so if you get a thousand
of those two hundred thousand dollars, we kind of looked at this and thought for five hundred,
six hundred thousand dollars we could scrape by to do a kind of experiment with this and
that would deliver a service that would probably be on the order of better than Comcast
internet essentials at the time 25, 3 or now 55 I think my goal would be more like 25 or
30 – 10 in terms of of having a better more upstream than you typically find and um and uh
in a robust downstream as well.
For people who aren't familiar with those numbers just think of
you're basically a connection that will support three to four people doing zoom calls at
the same time um and the library could check those out those pucks out effectively
or the school district could distribute them um I think trying to collect you know revenue from
that is probably more trouble than it's worth um but that's kind of where we are costing it
out this is something we're seeing a lot of in terms of community networks moving forward and
I thought it might be helpful just to cover kind of a little bit of the costs of why this approach
is exciting um there is limited bandwidth and so in some urban areas it will not perform as well
as in other urban areas uh depending on how many other systems are competing for that bandwidth um
but this goal of trying to prevent having to send someone to the home to install equipment that
then may have to be adjusted from time to time that's kind of one of the reasons that
people are adopting this CBRS technology. I think it's very exciting I desperately hope that
in coming years we see the FCC create more of this um perhaps even some that would be exclusively
for use by libraries or they would have some kind of prioritized use um but that's kind of
an overview and then anyway I'd love to have a a couple of minutes for Q and A if anyone has any
and I don't want to take any of Sarbani's time. [Don Means] That's great Chris uh it's
a good story.
What's the population for that project you're trying to serve?
[Chris Mitchell] um I think if you start getting beyond a thousand people using it you're gonna
want to have more antenna sites because you're just I don't I mean I'm not I'm not an expert on
on how much you can push through this but I think you know as you get beyond a thousand people using
it there's you can have so many people trying to use it simultaneously that you'll see significant
degradation in performance and so I would say you know my impression is on the order
of of um if you can have aim to serve less than a thousand people in a circle of
about a core of about a a half mile radius. [Don Means] Right.
[Chris Mitchell] um you know in the right environment of not having too many
tall buildings and things like that um you know you can get away with that on the order of um you
know of many hundreds of thousands of dollars but less than a million dollars per and that's over
five years, I mean you're gonna have to invest a little bit more to update hockey pucks some
will get lost um you know um but um but for the most part your recurring costs are really going
to be more about that the bandwidth, you know, which is going to be probably um you know anywhere
from if you're doing a gig said 10 gigs which is probably what you want you know I'm gonna guess
you're in the um hundreds of dollars to thousands of dollars per month depending on where you are.
[Don Means] Right, well you're right uh CBRS is in fact uh an exciting area of spectrum uh policy and
management and and uh uh and implementations we've touched on this range I mean through the series
we've focused on various you know spectrum types TV whitespace, EBS, CBRS five gigahertz is you
know very practical in certain circumstances uh uh question for you is you know how how to start this
I mean how do you how do how do you analyze your environment I mean you just can't say let's go do
a CBRS you want to find out what's what you've got and you know where to start, it's just?
[Chris Mitchell] I wouldn't have even gotten this far if not for the fact that
we have a great ISP in Minneapolis a local company that I've become close friends with over
the years U.S.
Internet for anyone who watches you know we do a show called connect this where
the the owner of that um is uh he and I co-host talking about different topics uh he's been on my
podcast a bunch of times so I talk about him all the time but but he was just he's already planning
on trying to do this and and so trying to do this is very difficult if you don't have that and so
one of the first things to do is try to cultivate someone who's in this space in part because you
know for he has a relationship with the vendors if you're trying to like the supply chains being
in disarray right now trying to get all this stuff lined up it can be hard, so if you can have a good
relationship with someone um that's the way to get this started on a one-off um otherwise it's going
to be quite difficult you really need to find someone that is going to have some background
in it have relationships that you can build on um and so I think that's you know I think a lot
of cities, even rural areas have somebody nearby who has this kind of expertise they may be hard
to find but you know whether it's you Don or me or other people like Dustin um I think a lot of
us have some of these relationships so we can try to find the right people in different areas.
[Don Means] Well you're right there are a lot of uh wireless ISPs around the country and
they're uh ingenious folks and also very invested in their communities which is really
uh different from the from the major uh you know uh carriers who have allegiances elsewhere
and we've said for a long time go ahead. [Chris Mitchell] Oh and and one of the
things we've seen I mean not Buffalo um the hot part of Colorado and Denver, Boulder
um they have used their public facilities schools in such a partnership with a
wireless company where that wireless company uses those spaces to set up as transmitters
and then they offer free service for certain people as part of that deal and I think that's
an opportunity um that's really worth pursuing in particularly more urban areas where it's difficult
to figure out where you can put transmitters up, if you can have a relationship where you're
trying to sell to some folks and other folks get free service that can be a win-win.
[Don Means] Yeah there's a lot of ways to go with this and I appreciated your your
early comment about lessons, you know so whatever you try to do however it turns out you
probably are smarter than you were before and that's valuable, that's valuable um and and you
make the case for anchors uh not just as network nodes but as functional uh players in a working uh
community network and and appreciate that point. So we'll see if we've got time at the end
but we do want to get to um uh Sarbani and uh Let me share again here.
You can
see Chris I have demoted you. [Chris Mitchell] Thank you for your time today and
uh and I appreciate it I'm gonna um tell everyone I'm the president today. [laughter] First slide we
got you there okay uh Sarbani thank you so much uh you know you you're staying up kind of late in
in uh India and we're we're excited to have you and hear your your story and so please uh
take it away. Let me stop the share here and you are you're up.
[Sarbani Banerjee Belur] yes um yes thank, you thanks a lot and I I really
feel uh very happy to share my work along with all of you all. I am based out of Mumbai at
the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and the Senior Research Scientist here sorry and
um I am also the Asia Regional Coordinator for the Association for Progressive Communications um
based out of Mumbai have been working in the area of connecting the unconnected by seeding
community networks to grow in remote rural villages of India uh for for a long time now
for the past five to six years um today I'm going to talk a little bit about the role of
local libraries and community networks.
So, we all know about libraries as something that is
there in the urban areas and these are these are sort of the repository of knowledge um so we
um so this is nothing much to say, it's like a collection of information and repository of
knowledge, it is also an interconnected platform where these libraries are like we have quite a
lot of library networks in India and which is like which is each of the universities in India are
connected to each other through the libraries and similar way the state governments also have
library networks, so each of these libraries are again connected. So, uh and it also makes
information very easily accessible by all and um now with the advent of connectivity um uh
being very uh a predominant uh so it is like digital libraries and um open versus subscription
model like some of the information that you can get from the Indian Institute of Technology
Library you will not get it somewhere else, until and unless you have a subscription
model.
Now connected library networks are they work in two different ways that
there is a central library and the library is connected to each other and then the
second picture on the on the right hand side shows that each of the libraries also speak to each
other and there is a central library connection. Now um I I just want to tell a little bit about
uh the government of India BharatNet initiative uh this is an initiative taken by the government
of India to to lay optical fiber network to all the village council offices. All the village
councils that is 250,000 village councils in India and called the Gram Panchayats so now
in that library is also included as one of the locations within the village where
um where the connectivity can be taken to. So they have identified the government office,
the post office, angan badi or the or the crash, primary health care center and schools as the
other other locations where the connectivity will will be enabled and it has been there for quite a
number of village councils where the connectivity has already reached um so so that's there but
the relevance of libraries in rural areas is not so um is not we can't we don't see it yet
in the rural areas and the reason is that the rural uh communities in the rural communities
um the illiteracy and semi-literacy rates are very high in India.
So there is so
that's a reason why a library as a structure doesn't exist so much in the rural
areas in comparison to the urban areas. Now uh what are the role of community networks?
um so we all speak about community networks just think about community networks as networks
by the people, for the people. It's nothing that is that we um so it is all based on the community
needs, so we are not even talking about our needs of connecting the unconnected but it is the
communities needs to connect themselves and why they want to connect themselves? What
they want to do out of that connectivity? It is entirely left to the community. We
don't we don't enforce anything on them and of course when it is based on community needs
it is owned by the community, so sometimes sometimes the initial capex expenditure is done
through some project funding or the other but most of the times what happens is that communities
identify infrastructure that is already available or resources that are that are already
available in their locations like for example if there is a need of a tower they might
want to set up a tower with the bamboo. Bamboo if that is there so it is in
one of the community networks in Brazil um they have set up they have built a tower of
bamboo because bamboo is also readily available there.
Then these community networks doesn't only
bridges the digital divide but also they bridge these networks bridge the social divides.
In India we have the other social divides of gender, caste and class so you know in this in
the community networks everyone has an equal say, everyone becomes becomes a member
of that connectivity journey, so and everything sustainability model
is also looked at through partnerships and entrepreneurship models, i'll tell you
tell it a little later in the presentation and in community networks everything is local.
We don't want anything to come from outside, it is everything local. So capacity building is
also local the devices we just get the devices from outside but most of the things are local.
Now in an ideal scenario the connectivity usage in community networks are often seen like this, that
you have a device most of the times it is a solar panel because enabled the azure energy source
and we have these devices uh within the community and people use it.
So. so people use the
devices uh as people use the connectivity mostly of connecting to the wireless wireless
uh through the to the local access server. So they are not exactly connecting with
each other but mostly as a repository, a local access server that is placed in the
community becomes a local library for them um and and this is what is an ideal scenario
but there are it this is not the only scenario there are other scenarios which you can
see in different community networks.
Now what is this role of local libraries? Now,
why are we talking about local libraries and not talking about libraries as such what we find in
the urban areas? Because these local libraries caters to the community needs and in most of
the cases where community networks are dealing with or they enable connectivity to the indigenous
indigenous population indigenous tribal population and in these indigenous tribal population they
have a lot of local knowledge of their own. Like for example, in some of these communities language
is language is sort of eroding. They don't they don't know whether the language will remain,
the writing script or the the way they speak, it might not be their existent
in the next generation or for example a particular type of music or
a cultural practice that they follow might not be relevant for the next generation.So they want
these knowledge local in an indigenous knowledge to be collected in that local access server which
is the local library in the community and uh what what happens is that these local library
uh this local access local access servers are housed in a location which becomes the
center for capacity building and training of the local youth and and in a way what happens is that
people then try to understand within the community they explore options by which they can they can
enable certain types of entrepreneurship options uh for for economic empowerment and this type of
libraries the local library suits the needs of illiterate and semi-literate population because
they don't know how to read and write, so they don't connect themselves with the other libraries
where we have such such a number of digital books and other information and everything stays
within the community and everything is local. Now, how is local knowledge creation in
community networks? Like we have discussed about now I just discussed about local knowledge
now how it is created.
Now we identify what are the different types of local knowledge? Like this
is an example of the local knowledge in the in the location community network that that I seeded to
grow in the year 2019 uh funded by uh association for progressive communications, in a location that
is in remote Maharashtra uh five hours drive from Mumbai. Now we have a community support center
um that is the location where the local access server is placed and I was telling you about that
this is the location where the capacity building of the youth takes place and now we have access
points this is uh only connectivity is enabled through a sim card based cellular router at
the community support center at the rest of the network is an offline mesh network and what
happens is most of the youth what they do is or people in the community if they I didn't if
they know some art forms of this like for example painting or music or things of that sort they come
to the access point that is placed in the ham, in the on top of the house um that serves as an
uh wi-fi hotspot also they come and they they upload the content on to the local access server
and the local access server is connected to the cellular router and that's the only avenue for the
local access server to be connected to the online, online space which by which we can look into the
content that is being created in the local access server.
So this is this makes it possible
for the people in the village to not only see each other's uh or whatever knowledge
but also within themselves as well. We also do a lot of infrastructure reuse and
sharing that's what I had mentioned earlier and some type of indigenous technology development
like we use routers like LibreRouter, LibreMesh, community radio and community platform
and e-commerce website for the community. Now this is one form of local library that
we have set up in our community network is a knowledge sharing platform and if you look
at it this is what is this gist of the talk that I gave just now is that this these tribal
people being indigenous tribes they have a lot of knowledge on agrobiodiversity now and they
also have a lot of knowledge on art and culture of this and none of this is in any written form,
so it is just by word of mouth that passes on from generation to generation and what we have
enabled is that an offline mobile application by which this information is collected from
the agrobiodiversity information is collected from the farmers and from the common people in
the community art and culture information is is is shared so they they get this information
they put it up in the local access server and that's where that's their local library and this
is this is um and this information out of that art and culture some of the paintings and paper
mesh art has been converted into products and if you look at it these are some of the products
which we sell online as in the e-commerce platform that becomes opportunity gives them gives them the
opportunity to earn money out of the connectivity, so that's from me yes thanks.
[Don Means] That's wonderful uh you, your final point there about a a market for
these uh cultural uh uh crafts uh you know that that these villages you point out are are
in are unique in a lot of ways the way they've evolved historically and their dialects and all
that and their art also and I there must be a lot of interest in these kinds of things around the
world and the internet allows you to find.
So, did I understand that the principal backhaul for the
for these community networks is the cell network? [Sarbani Banerjee Belur] uh Yes. So here,
because this is a location uh where which is located within the uh amongst uh covered
by three uh covered by hills on three sites and this is this location is in the valley so
connectivity is very difficult to get so what we that community support center which I uh showed
is the location where the mobile signal strength is the strongest and we put up a tower on top of
the house on the community support center and a sim card based cellular router has been put up
on top of it so it catches the mobile signals and the wi-fi through the wi-fi the wi-fi signals
are uh detected on the smartphone below the below the community support center, yes over
there and that's how the connectivity is at only that location enabling banking facilities.
You'll see this woman on the left hand side in the orange dress, she is the digit she is the
banking correspondent and she accesses that wi-fi signals on a smartphone and with a biometric
device enables banking facilities to the villagers in the village, yes.
[Don Means] Outstanding uh you you open with the uh approach of uh
community networks by and for the communities, it still seems like it would be a major
challenge in a lot of villages to actually build such a thing that you just described
so certainly someone from somewhere outside of the village has to come in and help.
[Sarbani Banerjee Belur] Yes, we often work together with the organizations that are already
working within the village so we can't go into the village and tell them that oh come let's
let's set up a community network so they don't accept us within the village, so we this is this
community network which was seeded to grow in 2019 has been an effort two and a half years before
that we had started the journey with the community so we work with organizations that
are working within the community and we uh we work together with them to uh to
get the community buy-in for uh for deploying network of their own, yes.
[Don Means] Great, so um there's always the question of uh sustainability
right, the the business model to keep you know pay up front and then ongoing costs uh
I'm sure this cell connection is not cheap if a lot of people are demanding a lot of data through
it uh so how does that uh how does that work, how do people, how does it sustain itself?
[Sarbani Banerjee Belur] Yes um so so we don't provide because I I am from the academic
institution, so we we cannot provide any services and earn money out of the connectivity.
So, the
sim card based cellular router has two sim card that can be inserted into it and the
two sim cards are of this banking correspondent lady whom you see in this
photograph on the left hand side and she and she does the mobile recharge a normal
mobile recharge you don't even have to do expensive bandwidth backhaul, nothing like
that it's just the uh the data that you get on your mobile phone is what she uses and
utilizes to earn money uh by enabling these banking services within the village. So, so she
earns money by enabling the banking services in the village and so she charges a commission
for every transaction and the villagers instead how do they earn money is most on the offline
network. They they um they share their local knowledge, like I showed these art forms this art
and culture forms uh so these are the things that this share on the offline mesh network, on
the local access server then the information is stored there and we identified products how
to make certain products like paintings paper mesh and all paper mesh masks and all and those
are being sold online in an e-commerce platform so these you see that painting there and the paper
mesh thing these are being sold online so it is so the money goes directly to the people in the
village community we don't we are no middlemen in involved in it we only identify
the products that needs to be put up online in the e-commerce platform, yes.
[Don Means] Dnd so the so there's no sharing of the revenue the support the network?
[Sarbani Banerjee Belur] No, no. [Don Means] Okay, all right right yes well this
is this is really impressive uh the it embodies a kind of an approach that we've been advocating
for a long time around community networking is a a combination to build out and build in so we
assert that it's the responsibility of government to build out towards communities not connect
to everybody it's it's too much to ask but to to connect a point of presence uh an
anchorage a public anchor institution off of which these networks can be built and then the
responsibility uh and and urge this idea that you embody and Chris talks about of of self-reliance
and self-responsibility to take ownership of your of your local network uh I mean you
can do it however you want to and however you can you want to sell your community
to you know a company it's yours you know but otherwise uh to uh then uh you know uh
connect at that at that interchange point um your one of your slides showed an interesting
uh image of a charging station, a phone charging station is that is that connected to the
network there the phone charger or is it just a? [Sarbani Banerjee Belur] Yes, yes so that's uh the
phone charger that has been enabled on the solar solar battery backup with a 72 solar battery
backup that is there and that's a phone charger so people can charge their phones on it and um
yeah so and this location being very um there's a lot of sunlight there and it's only it rains
only very heavily only for the three months of July, August and September
so but the rest of the time it's perfect and it is working perfectly well.
[Don Means] uh How much does that cost? [Sarbani Banerjee Belur] So, the solar the
solar ones the solar panels that we have set up are small solar panels uh which is which
which has not a we don't use a lot of space for the battery backup and it is it is not
very expensive we went in for a very cheap model of solar panels made proprietary uh pro it's it's
a proprietary thing from a company here in India called m2m Cybernetics um that has provided us
the solar panels.
So that Capex infrastructure that we have invested is from the uh APC grant. So
APC has funded us for that project in 2019 where we set up the solar panels and the tower that we
have put up on the community support center here the tower is not there but something like this
on the community support center we have a tower and the access points so that's the thing that we
have got as grants from APC and the rest of it is the capacity building is from the people in
the village they deployed the network we did the training and and they are using it in their
own ways like they identified community radio as a technology development that they
wanted to use and so that is developed on a Raspberry Pi device, yes.
[Don Means] That's great uh this this kind of initiative is really critical I
think uh because there's so many people that are in similar situations since this village around
the world, you know? Three and a half billion people are yet to have this kind of capability
and there are a lot of different ways to do it uh uh next week we're going to be
talking about offline internet, you know? There's a lot of things that you can do digital
services without you know the open internet and uh so this is this is highly uh interesting
and uh you you're to be complimented you and APC for all the great work you guys have done
um let me I'm looking for any questions for design is appreciated, the backup power, the sim
card all every all the components there. The capacity building is I think as you pointed
out is is really critical to the success of this because you have you know we we would think
of these things in sort of developed countries we have a you know standardized literacy platform
to build services on but it's not applicable everywhere and you're translating
that into whatever the the medium of communication is in in the location, right?
[Sarbani Banerjee Belur] Yes, yes.
So we we completely completely go with the community
and what the community wants to do with the connectivity and when we initially began with this
project um so two and a half years before 2019 so 2017 when we exactly started discussing they
made it very clear that they don't want a 24 into 7 connectivity at all because they know that
they cannot pay for such a connectivity. So they told that just enable us the banking services with
that connectivity and the rest of it is can be an offline mesh network and we can do things on that
offline thing. So we have a talkie application that's an open source application which is like
the offline WhatsApp system, so they can talk to each other they can share, they can chat with
each other, they can share files with each other on that talkie application, yes.
[Don Means] Great and you you make the point that there's so much valuable
information which is not high bandwidth. [Sarbani Banerjee Belur] Yes.
[Don Means] You know our favorite example of the difference between data and information is in kind
of like a really uh urgent situation there's some crisis you've lost contact with your family and
the value of the information in a text message you know mom we're okay versus the amount of
data in that message is just illustrative of you know the difference between data information.
So there's a lot to be done very low uh bandwidths uh you know people get feverish about you know
gigabit connectivity but the things that we're, we really need to have communication or not high
bandwidth you know email and text messages and these kind and these small transactions uh are are
great for this kind of a technology as it evolves and of course people always want more once they
have you know get it going.
So um thank you again Sarbani for showing up uh we are over a little
bit on our time here um but uh well we are over a little bit on our time so I think we will uh close
our recorded session uh now. Stephen, thank you..
