Bridging the Digital Divide by Building and Developing Wireless Community Networks in Rural Areas of Sri Lanka

Abstract

This paper discusses how new and emerging wireless technologies could be deployed together with Open Source product lines in expediting the propagation of the ICT know-how in the rural as well as the suburban areas of Sri Lanka. The intention of the authors is to showcase a blueprint for using newer and emerging viable communication technologies in the rural context. Current internet distribution networks generally rely on a permanent, fixed and largely wired infrastructure that is owned and often operated by large entities such as telecom operators or an Internet Service Provider. A relatively new and emerging technology is wireless Ethernet or wireless networking using the IEEE 802.11 standard. This standard encompasses the lower layers of the OSI model for transport of data as Ethernet frames using a spread spectrum based radio link. This technology opens the possibility of building a network without having the problems associated with, and the cost of putting some sort of physical transmission medium in the ground. Instead, antennas can be used to send and receive data using radio waves through free air. Due to the relative simplicity of the currently available commodity hardware that uses IEEE 802.11 technology it is relatively easy to build a local wireless community network in a community township. Using this network people can share resources among each other and, more importantly, it would facilitate the adaptation of a highly collaborative environment forgoing the language barriers, which is regarded as a major cause of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka.