The Village Telco project: a reliable and practical wireless mesh telephony infrastructure

Abstract

VoIP (Voice over IP) over mesh networks could be a potential solution to the high cost of making phone calls in most parts of Africa. The Village Telco (VT) is an easy to use and scalable VoIP over meshed WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) telephone infrastructure. It uses a mesh network of mesh potatoes to form a peer-to-peer network to relay telephone calls without landlines or cell phone towers. This paper discusses the Village Telco infrastructure, how it addresses the numerous difficulties associated with wireless mesh networks, and its efficient deployment for VoIP services in some communities around the globe. The paper also presents the architecture and functions of a mesh potato and a novel combined analog telephone adapter (ATA) and WiFi access point that routes calls. Lastly, the paper presents the results of preliminary tests that have been conducted on a mesh potato. The preliminary results indicate very good performance and user acceptance of the mesh potatoes. The results proved that the infrastructure is deployable in severe and under-resourced environments as a means to make cheap phone calls and render Internet and IP-based services. As a result, the VT project contributes to bridging the digital divide in developing areas.

The Dreams Plan: A Blupoint Strategy for e‐Education Provision in South Africa

“…The First Mile will typically operate at the community level of analysis, while the Last Mile will typically operate at the commercial level of analysis. It has been argued that the First Mile cannot ignore traditional economic considerations entirely (Fallis 2003) and this has been confirmed in practical experience (Adeyeye & Gardner-Stephen, 2011;Kozak 2013;Paisley & Richardson 1998;Richard & Philpot 2013). For example organisations such as United Villages have found that a bottomup grass roots understanding of supply and demand at the local level is critical in delivering the 'last inch' of the last mile (Hasson, 2010 (2004) has suggested, the private and public sectors are to work together for the greater good, it is essential that we journey together in facing the challenge of high quality e-education materials for the people of South Africa, but in a cost efficient and financially sustainable manner.…”

Implementing OLSR and Wireless VoIP as Low-Cost Infrastructure Telephony for Rural Area

“…The main goal is providing internet access and cheap telecommunications for rural or remote areas which are shown in Table 1. Most of project using inexpensive off-the-shelf hardware devices in their implementation such as VillageTelco project [3], Digital Gangetic Plains in Kanpur [9], Wray Project in England [4], Fractel Project in India [10], AirJaldi Network in India [5], Pebbles Valley Mesh Network in South Africa [6] and the LinkNet wireless network in Zambia [11]. Others include the Tegola Mesh [8] and Sengerema Mesh Network [7].…”

RAPID: Traffic-agnostic intrusion detection for resource-constrained wireless mesh networks

“…Cooperative mechanisms incur high communication overhead, caused by message exchange required for intrusion detection, and high detection latency [39], since some of decisions are made only after receiving other nodes' reports. Therefore, although cooperative IDS have proven viable for low-traffic networks, e.g., sensor networks, they are not practical (i.e., degrades the network performance and delays intrusion response) in WMN with significant traffic [6,7,27,40,41].…”

“…WMN can also serve as a backbone communication infrastructure among mobile or fixed clients, and hosts (e.g., local file servers). Recently, the number of WMN deployments has been increasing since they are suitable for many applications such as disaster response [1][2][3], environmental monitoring [4], rural IT services [5,6] and many others [7].…”