Three billion people living in developing nations, about 42% of the population, are under the age of 15. The Green Wi-Fi project has the goal of bringing internet access to these children, and doing it in a way that makes sense for a developing country.

Unlike developed nations, many of the places where this technology was designed to be deployed lack electricity, so the Green Wi-Fi project designed a self-contained unit consisting of a solar panel, charge controller and battery for power, and a modified Linksys WRT54GL wireless router with a high gain external omni-directional antenna for the internet access part. These boxes form the nodes of a self-healing mesh network. Connect one or more of them to the internet somehow (often via a cellular modem) and you can share that connection across the entire mesh. Since the boxes need no external power, they can be placed on rooftops anywhere to build up the mesh.

Got Wi-Fi, Now What?
Having a solar powered Wi-Fi mesh alone doesn’t get you much, so what else is needed to make this useful? Well, the most obvious thing that is needed next is computers, and the OLPC project’s XO laptop makes a perfect device for use with the mesh Wi-Fi network. The team at Green Wi-Fi have also developed solar charging solutions for these little laptops, allowing a school to have a collection of them which can be charged using a panel mounted on the roof of the school building.

Bruce Baikie, Green Wi-Fi’s CEO, just returned from a trip to Senegal along with a group of high school volunteers from San Francisco, where they delivered 25 OLPC laptops to the village school, and installed a 60W solar charging station for them too. The US high school students also trained the village’s teachers how to use and maintain the new laptops, as well as helping to repair school rooms, desks, the village health clinic, bathrooms, roofs, and anything else they could help with. Later this year Bruce will be returning to install a Wi-Fi mesh (they currently have just a single network connection provided by a very power-hungry, and somewhat unreliable, CDMA modem).

Photos from Senegal

[Senegal photos with thanks from Bruce Baikie @ Green Wi-Fi.]

Tags: africa, bruce baikie, green wifi, Internet, laptop, olpc, senegal, solar, wifi

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