I remember reading about Nepal’s not-so-local area network years ago, but it’s still an amazing story:
With no telephone line, no way of funding a satellite phone link, and with the country in the grip of insurgency, Mahabir realized that to bring 21st-century communications facilities to his village, he would have to leapfrog the conventional technology route. In 2001 he wrote to a BBC radio show asking for help in using the recently developed home-WiFi technology to connect his village to the internet. Intrigued listeners emailed with advice and offers of assistance.Backpacking volunteers from around the world smuggled in wireless equipment from the US and Britain after the Nepalese government banned its import and use during the insurgency, and suspicious Maoist rebels tried to destroy it. By 2003, with all the parts in place, Mahabir had linked Nangi to its nearest neighbour, Ramche, installed a solar-powered relay station (TV antennae fixed to a tall tree on a mountain peak) and from there sent the signal more than 20 kilometers away to Pokhara, which had a cable-optic connection to Kathmandu, the capital. Nangi was online.
Mahabir says he used a home WiFi kit from America that was recommended for use within a radius of 4 meters. “I emailed the company and told them that I had done 22 kilometers with it,” he says. “I was hoping they might donate some equipment?—?but they didn’t believe what I told them.”
More than 40 other remote mountain villages (60,000 people) have now been networked and connected to the internet by Mahabir and his stream of enthusiastic volunteers, and many more are in the pipeline. The villagers are now able to communicate with people in other villages and even with their family members abroad by email and using VOIP (voice over internet protocol) phones, he says. Using the local VOIP system, they can talk for free within the village network.
As we embark on another full day’s climb up to Relay No. 1 with spare parts to fix a broken component, Mahabir explains that email and phones are simply the means of achieving his goal of providing better education, health facilities, and an income to villagers. It’s already working: Mahabir’s “teleteaching” network allows the few good teachers in the region to train others and to provide direct instruction to students in any connected village school. Children surfing the net are learning about a whole world of opportunity outside of their isolated village. And Mahabir is developing an e-library of educational resources that will be free to use.
The technology has improved commerce, allowing yak farmers several days’ walk away to talk to dealers and their families, and enabling people to sell everything from buffalo to homemade paper, jams, and honey. And the villages, many located on beautiful but little-visited trekking routes by the Annapurna range of mountains, are advertising their facilities for tourists. “We are setting up secure credit-card transaction facilities using the internet so that more tourists will come and provide an income stream to help finance the education and health projects,” Mahabir says.
Telemedicine, via webcam, is now linking village clinics with a teaching hospital in Kathmandu. And nurses are getting trained in reproductive medicine and child care.