 Hello, everyone. Good afternoon, good evening, or good morning, depending on where you're joining us from. Welcome to Engineering for Change, or E4C for Short. Today, we're pleased to bring you the latest in E4C's 2017 webinar series, Technologies for Connecting the Unconnected. My name is Mariela Hachado, and I'm program manager here at E4C. I lead a moderator for today's webinar. The webinar you're participating in today is part of E4C's professional development offerings. Information on upcoming webinars in the series, as well as archived videos of past presentations, can be found on the E4C webinars webpage, as well as on our YouTube channel. Both of those URLs are listed on the slide right now. If you have any questions, comments, and recommendations for future topics and speakers, please contact the E4C webinar series team at webinars at engineeringforchange.org. 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New Delhi, Ohio. Welcome, everyone. Texas. Great. So during the webinar, please use the Q&A window located below the chat to type in your questions for the presenters. Again, if you don't see it, click the Q&A icon in the top right corner. If you're listening to the audio broadcast and you encounter any troubles, try hitting stop and then start. You may also want to try to reopen WebEx in a new browser. E4C webinars qualify engineers for one professional development hour. To request your PDH, please follow the instructions on the top of E4C professional development page after the presentation. The link listed here in the slide. Great. So I would like to take a moment now to tell you a bit about today's webinar and our presenters. Last summer, the UN declared that it considers the internet to be a human right. Yet 53% of the world's population still doesn't have access to the internet today. This is why organizations that are doing work in information and communication technologies for development, or ICT for short, are designing and delivering innovative technologies to ensure inclusive access to ICTs in areas without infrastructure. Today, Shurada Srinivasan from One World Connective will share with us an overview of dozens of case studies covering interventions to connect the unconnected and promote broadband adoption. These real-world examples will provide unique insights on new technologies used for providing last mile connectivity, including TV white spaces, the use of unlicensed spectrum lamps, and community networks. Shurada Srinivasan, and I hope I said that right, Shurada, is a CTIC research fellow working on One World Connective. Shurada holds a master of public policy from the National Law School of India University in Bangalore and completed her undergraduate degree in electrical and electronics engineering. She moderates the dynamic coalition on innovative approaches to connecting the unconnected and contributes to the intersectional work of the internet governance work. In the past, she has engaged with regulatory barriers to internet deployment in the developing world, cybersecurity, encryption policy, and network neutrality, and internships teams with the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin and Center for Internet and Society in Bangalore. Without any further to say, I will pass the mic now to Shurada. Welcome, everyone. Welcome, Shurada, and thank you for joining us. Am I on the booth? Yes. Great. It's a pleasure to be conducting this E4C August webinar on Connecting the Unconnected. As Mariela already mentioned, my webinar is going to focus on technologies to connect the unconnected, and I will be looking at it both from the supply side and the demand side. Before we start the webinar, I wanted to go into what I mean when I said the supply side and the demand side. And in this presentation, we will probably cover a variety of things which look at what the context is when looking at connectivity and last mile connectivity in particular, and supply side being lack of infrastructure or lack of mobile network coverage or lack of electricity type problems that exist and demand side being after having coverage, geographic coverage, what are the other challenges that exist which might have to do with skills, with literacy, with affordability. So those are the two different sides that we will look at when we think of last mile connectivity and connecting the unconnected. But before we get started on all of that, just a bit of context. So to frame this entire webinar, we need to understand that right now, 53% of the world's population is currently offline. A lot of these communities are in the global south and Africa and Asia in particular are seeing flattening rates of adoption. What I mean is that the growth rate of more and more subscribers is actually slowing down in both Africa and Asia. And we are seeing that that gap that exists between the people that are connected which is the world internet users from internet stats and the number of people in the world globally is going to, like it has already reached 4 billion and is not really closing. And that trend has been seen especially in the last few years. So in that context, we need to ask ourselves what challenges exist to access. So of course there are going to be supply side barriers which is that there are communities that don't have access to electricity and communities that don't have access to mobile cell towers or infrastructure that allows them to get access to communication. But increasingly, surveys in the developing world in Brazil, in China, in India are saying that there is not just a problem of people not having access to a mobile phone signal, it's also that there is a lack of relevant content on the internet for them. There is a lack of skills that they have in terms of using devices to get access to the internet. And also they see a problem in terms of affordability. So they don't have accessible plans that they can use easily to be able to get access to internet or internet enabled devices. So these are supply and demand side barriers that exist. And to be able to surmount these barriers, we need to have an approach that looks at both of them. So the presentation that I will make today is going to look at case studies. Why case studies? Before like going into the case studies themselves, because we wanted to identify as a research project, one word connected as a project that I work with, we wanted to understand from the grassroots what is happening in order to bridge this gap. We realized that there were a number of initiatives that were ongoing, but there was very little knowledge sharing that really happened between these projects. Some of them were like, most of them were reinventing the wheel in Africa and Southeast Asia, in Latin America. And we really wanted to get empirical data and experiences from the ground to see, well, what is working in certain parts of the world in terms of connectivity and bridging that adoption gap? And how can other projects learn from it? What are the comparisons that we can draw? What are the lessons that we can learn? So that's the reason why we adopted a case studies approach to be able to understand last mile connectivity, because we saw that there was a paucity of systematic data gathering on such organizations, even though we found hundreds of them when we started looking for these organizations. So I'm going to structure this into two parts. I'm going to first talk about supply-side solutions, and then I'm going to talk about demand-side solutions. So supply-side solutions are going to be primarily about laying out the infra. And I'm going to look at two specific technologies that are used or that are innovative that you've studied that help in bridging the adoption gap in areas that have no mobile signal. So these are areas that are often so far-flung or have such low population that mobile network operators don't see a business case in going and setting up a tower there, because it's more expensive to go to a remote area and set up a tower when the number of subscribers that will use this tower would be a few hundred people. And the operational cost of getting that tower up and keeping it running is incredibly high, and unviable for that operator to keep track of. So you have these little innovative ideas called community networks, and in some instances, TVWide spaces that's a technology that's being used in very innovative ways to be able to bridge that last mile gap. So before we get started on a case study, what are community networks? So community networks are basically people, communities coming together, not a company or an organization, but more often than not just collectives of people that come together and say, well, we don't have access to the internet right now, and we should maybe just put together a bunch of routers, collectively own the network, and then buy a connection to the main access point. So a lot of people pool in the ability, pool in their resources to be able to get access to connectivity and to the internet more broadly. So they're often collectively owned by cooperatives or non-governmental organizations. They're socially managed in that people all come together and make collective decisions around it. They have open design in that they allow for more and more people to add to the network. They have open participation in terms of there is no exclusion of a particular person if they want access to connectivity, to not get that connectivity within that community. They promote peering and transit amongst their members. There's also a consideration of security and privacy, and they promote this development and circulation of local content. So this is an aspirational declaration of a number of community networks that came together and declared that this is how they recognize community networks there. And there are multiple versions of it that are currently ongoing around the world. NetCommon, which is a European consortium, research consortium found about 200 to 300 community networks in operation around the world. Some of them are not working anymore, but these are all set up at some point and have had some data on them. So we started studying some of them systematically, the ones that are working, the ones that we could get access to, and we started building our case studies. So the first one that I wanted to talk about actually happens in a very remote setting. In the island nation of Vanuatu, which is in the South Pacific Ocean, there is an island called Mevo, which until like 2014, 2016 actually, did not have access on the eastern side of the island to any mobile network, like literally none. And they tried very hard to get DigiSELF, which was the dominant operator in Vanuatu, and pleaded with the government to give them access to connectivity, but to no avail, they couldn't really succeed in doing that. So in late last year, a number of these people, like number of these people in the village, came together and built what they call their first community network with the help of two US Peace Corps volunteers that were there. And they created a Mevo Telecommunications Committee, which is the organization or the non-governmental cooperative that runs that network. And decided to basically connect their health center and school to a satellite backhaul that was provided by a disruptor in that market, called Pacific Satellite, and decided to get wireless last mile connectivity by that means. This was particularly important because Mevo did not have a hospital, the island did not have a hospital, and it cost nearly $400 US to get to Port Vila, which is the capital city, to be able to get treated. So Mevo Telecommunications Committee, the biggest need there was to help with the health and the education of the people that live there because the other problem that they also faced is in terms of getting a lot of educators given the remoteness of the island. So because of Mevo Telecommunications Committee, since the last year, they have built a community network that now has two villages, Kerepe and Navito, which have been connected to the internet for the first time, and this is like a short, this is a short snapshot of the impact that it has had. It's already provided access to healthcare in these two villages to 2,600 people, but all of this has been set up at a startup cost of just $6,000 US. Most of it was spent on equipment for the routers. The other success impact that they've had is that they've been able to convince the regulator to free up the 900 megahertz band and give them access to that spectrum to be able to connect that community. This allows people in Navito and Kerepi to get real-time updates from outside the island specifically to reach doctors. This is actually a nurse at the Navito Health Center who is connecting via Facebook to a doctor at the referral hospital in Luganville to be able to get advice on how to treat patients. The next case study that I wanted to go to is also a community network, except this time it's in the Democratic Republic of Congo in Africa. So basically, Iju is an island in the middle of Lake Kew, which is a large lake in Africa, and they did not have... It's a population of 300,000 people, most of which are about under 15 years of age, and they had no access to the internet at all until last year. So last year there was a non-governmental organization called Ensemble Port La Differance that worked with the community, the king of the island and the queen of the island, to be able to build their first mesh network there. And in the case of Vanuatu, like in the case of Vanuatu, the thing to note about the Pamohanet initial deployment is that it was used to connect primarily a weather board, weather updates board that filled a central marketplace on the island that served 10,000 people, as opposed to starting with provisioning of home broadband subscription, because the island had less than 10 computers on it. So like it wasn't like homes were really rich, most of them lived under one US dollar a day income, and therefore could not afford devices. So the easiest thing and the most effective thing in terms of getting internet connectivity to the island was to connect a node on the island to a base station, which was 60 kilometers away, and then like provide weather related and security related updates, especially given Congo situation, right? It allows, they also installed a small kiosk and now have, I think in the last year gained up to like 300 subscribers who like come to these kiosks and work on these computers that have now been provided. The impact of this again has been incredibly large because it provides the first internet access for the people at this marketplace. It provides travel and security related weather updates, which was incredibly important as a lot of people used to die in the lake before, and now they are able to get market prices on when to take the coffee that they grow on the island out to the mainland and be able to benefit as a consequence of that economy. They also get access to like accurate information and uncensored information, especially in Congo, wherein it's quite hard to get internet access often and there is a lot of shutdown. The last community network that I wanted to go through is the Nepal Wireless Networking Project. This is one of the older community networks that has been around for a while. It started in 1998, if I'm not wrong, in a small village in the Himalayas and now it's grown especially after the Nepal earthquake to include smart villages and provide a host of services, telemedicine, online education, e-commerce ventures, internet cafes, et cetera, which all are provided through this organization, the Nepal Wireless Networking Project, which again, sets up Wi-Fi routers in unconnected areas in remote hills of Nepal. This recently, especially in the last year, Nepal Wireless Networking Project has also started experimenting with TVWiP spaces, which I will get into more detail about right after this. So they, like the Nepal Wireless Networking Project in terms of impact, provides the first connectivity to 200 remote hamlets since 2001. 1998 was their pilot. So it also provides telemedicine and diagnostic facilities to small village clinics in these hamlets. And since 2015, after the earthquake, they have been working on disaster resilience in particular and provide smart villages where climate change, tracking, et cetera, can be like done in real time and data can be uploaded because of the connectivity that's provided at a lot of these hamlets. They also have helped the e-commerce industry by providing online bookings for tourists to come to a lot of these hill stations for vacation. The next technologies, and that was the supply side in terms of community networks. I wanted to go over a range of them in different parts of the world. The next technology on the supply side that I wanted to look at is TVWide Spaces. So TVWide Spaces are unused broadcasting frequencies in the wireless spectrum. Basically, earlier, legacy, because you had television channels that were broadcasting, you would leave space between the channels, like bands between the channels for buffering purposes. But the propagation characteristics of that spectrum are such that they allow for broadband internet propagation or use for broadband internet purposes. So the propagation characteristics are also such that they allow for long distance communication. This is incredibly important because in a lot of instances, middle mile is a huge problem. So you are able to connect to a base station, but then there is a long distance or far population for a very large distance or dense foliage, if it's a forested area. TVWide Spaces don't get obstructed by obstacles, which makes it much easier for them to use in areas with a lot of obstacles, with dense foliage, with like stone, et cetera. The wide-space spectrum typically ranges between 470 megahertz and 790 megahertz and they often require special devices to be able to use that frequency. So that's one of the challenges that exists with TVWide Spaces because there are very few manufacturers that are able to bring that cost down to a very affordable level for TVWide Space routers. The first example under TVWide Spaces that I wanted to go through was the Malavi TVWide Spaces Project, which was started by the University of Malavi in collaboration with the International Center for Theoretical Physics. They basically started connecting a start-apology hospital, school, airport, and research facility and they set the record for the longest operational TVWide Spaces link. So this was in 2013. So in 2015, they expanded that network from the university to connect another secondary school and the impact that it has had is on both the school as well as the community hospital that exists by providing them the ability to access telemedicine as well as access online educational content. The other really good impact that this project had was that it used the data to create or like facilitate regulatory frameworks that allow for TVWide Spaces to be utilized and be utilized in a manner that can be sustainable across projects, right? They created a dynamic spectrum allocation database in collaboration with different organizations in Malavi and Malavi is right now leading in terms of TVWide Spaces regulation in the region if not the world entirely. The next case study on TVWide Spaces that I wanted to go into was in May which is a state in the US. So rural Maine again has the problem that a lot of these rural remote communities have in that they don't have what mobile network operators would consider a critical mass to make a viable business case for connectivity. So there is a connected axiom deployment which serves like 40 customers in tribal Maine and that's supported by Microsoft's affordable access grant but they have like a very unique structure. So it's not like provided for free because these are subscribers, not necessarily public centers like a hospital or a school that were connected as in the earlier cases but they are like paying subscribers often home broadband users that get charged a discounted rate for the first year but then have to pay about $40 a month after that. The unique characteristic of this deployment is that they require mandatory digital literacy programs that allow for these subscribers, businesses as well as homeowners to be able to use the internet for their benefit. Things like how to use like emails like e-commerce platforms to market the goods or like communicate with people which I will like also cover later when I go more into the demand aspect. The impact that it has had is that even though it was like when I say 40 customers these are both businesses as well as home subscribers and a lot of these like businesses are able to serve larger demographics. So they've trained actually over 5000 adult learners since 2014 and allowed again for telemedicine to be implemented in one of the hospitals which is one of their customers but they also enable like closing of the homework gap which is considered a huge policy issue in the US by reducing time and travel costs of the individuals that now no longer have to travel long distances to go to a nearby library to access the internet for research for their homework. The next part of my presentation is going to focus on demand side solutions. So like I said, supply side and all of the work that you have heard of until now all of the stories that you have heard of until now are of instances where there's not even mobile network coverage but in a lot of areas in the world right now and this problem is particularly acute in Latin America there's already lots of geographic coverage like people, most people live within distance of a accessible mobile signal. However, they still don't adopt and that is mostly solved by demand side solution which is focused on training and capacity building on creating locally relevant content. And I wanted to go over a series of projects that we have studied that look at best practices to make this process of capacity building a lot more sustainable and the lessons that they have learned in doing so. So I'm going to first start with a Latin American example called S2LA Plus. So S2LA Plus actually provides like satellite educational content to rural schools in eight countries. It's started in Argentina and S2LA actually stands for school in Spanish if I'm not wrong and it used to produce like or provide like high quality content to like rural schools in eight Latin American countries but beyond that the project which is actually a CSR initiative of AT&T and Direct TV also trains teachers in audio visual technologies and use of multimedia in the classroom as well as allows teachers to record the programming that they're able to provide on this network. The channel also contains locally relevant content made collaboratively with the participating ministries of education out of the eight Latin American countries Columbia, Ecuador and Chile are currently participating in creating locally relevant content for the rural students in the local language in a context-specific manner which they then like are able to provide to the students and learn in a much more like systematic and of enriched way. The work that this has done has already connected two million students in eight countries of which 80% of the schools that they're connecting are actually rural schools and that's remarkable because a lot of these rural schools in many other parts of the world that we have been studying or have been researching on have absolutely no connectivity. A lot of them don't even have electricity outside of one staff room, right? So the STLR plus pedagogy is also trained over 65,000 teachers and an impact evaluation that was done specifically in Chile not by us but by an external evaluator provided us with the data that it improved academic performance at every grade level in Chile in particular. The next case study that I want to talk about is from Uganda and this takes the idea of a classroom to a new level. So in Uganda, they realized that there was a paucity of devices and a paucity of infrastructure to provide computer level training at every school. So mainly your foundation is a foundation or a nonprofit organization that works in Uganda that went around in jeeps like they basically took all terrain vehicles, converted them to have solar rooftop panels and provided devices in those all terrain vehicles which basically like go around the country, especially to rural school and train cool students and teachers in ICT. So they, this like basically because you're able to work in it with severe resource constraints, they're able to reach a lot of students or a lot of people that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to. So it's not always a requirement that training and capacity building has to be incredibly resource intensive or has to involve a large number of people. Uganda's example proof that a small, like they only have two all terrain vehicles but you will see the impact is huge because they're able to train over 200 children a day and that's like a mobile tent where they teach the children. So that's from the foundation itself. They're able to reach 5,000 people a year and they have like equipped over 60 teachers just in 2015 on basic computer like ICT skills which is a huge achievement for an organization that's been able to think quite innovatively and out of the box to be able to reach communities that are unconnected. The next example that I'm going to go into is actually just the capacity building program is also a content development program. So Intel at ACSR initiative that it tied with the government of India, especially as part of the follow the fiber initiative that was initiated prior to the national, like prior to the now new national digital literacy mission work which allowed for Intel to create content, mostly interactive content, easy to understand content that they could then do on flash cards or on Q cards to be able to impart ICT skills training and computer training. Like Intel didn't do this alone. It worked with 28 non-governmental organizations as well as key state governments including Karnataka and Tamil Nadu to be able to conduct workshops with this content that was developed by the Intel in-house team in collaboration, take it out to those people and train them using this new methodology. The reason why this was a particularly interesting case study for us was that they often focused on interactive learning and flash cards, Q cards and like even the online interface was very easy to understand and interact with for the people that were using devices for the first time or had very low literacy levels. They also focused on people that were like physically challenged and have reached over like almost a million people through face-to-face training in collaboration with all of these organizations. So again, Intel did a lot of the content development work but the face-to-face trainings are conducted by a lot of the partners. This is one of the ways in which digital literacy can be imparted, which is that you don't necessarily have to always surmount all the resources to be able to go out there to the field and be able to reach people. They've also trained, one of the organization that Intel works with has also trained physically challenged people like I said but they've also collaborated with state governments to reach another 120,000 people. Intel also worked to create all of these modules in regional languages because India's population, peace adversity of languages and English is not particularly comfortable for a lot of people from the country. So they developed this content that they did, the interactive content that I mentioned in six different languages and like were able to partner with relevant organizations in each of these states to be able to push out their training and train more people to be more digitally literate. The last, like a case study that I wanted to go into a Comcast Internet Essentials. This is a case study in the U.S. The, no, this is the second last case study but the work that Comcast Internet Essentials does is that it tries to actually combine supply and the demand gaps in a way. So it looked at the affordability gap in areas and both, and provides them with easy to access devices as well as very cheap internet connections for people especially in lower income strata in the U.S. As well as people that like are under study programs or like are under social assistance basically. They provide the online and in person training on internet use in two languages that is English as well as Spanish and work with almost 9,000 partners in various governments in civil society. They partner with libraries and district officials to be able to like train their people. The reason why Comcast Internet Essentials is I think quite like interesting to look at is also because they did longitudinal studies to measure impact in that they did a survey randomly selected Comcast Internet Essentials users two years in a row and studied what like the impact of them having Internet Essentials has been. So they've connected and this is as of last year they've connected 750,000 households and trained over 6.4 million people. This is combined like data for both face to face training through the partner organizations and people that have been supported through their website but the longitudinal studies that they did were particularly interesting because almost 95% of the respondents said that it helps them improve their child's grades and a lot of them reports that it was used in find it was like helpful to them. The internet connection in particular was helpful to them in finding new employment and employment sources. So clearly like providing access at lower, like at a cost that is easier for more people to access can be an incredibly valuable way to bridge adoption gap. Even in developed countries like the US it need not always be focused on developing world countries because there are like many people in the US that still don't have access to connectivity. One in five I think have home broadband access in the US and that's a remarkable statistic to remember as well. The last case study that I wanted to go into was on Ethiopia. It's actually the reason for including this case study in this presentation is because I not only wanted to look at ICT skills training for abled people but also for visually impaired people because the accessibility barrier that a lot of people have to the internet is often overlooked and should not be overlooked. So the adaptive technology center for the blind is actually one of the oldest organizations that is working in this area in Africa and in Ethiopia which has a high number of visually I think 20% of the population at some point has a visual disability and they provide internet access and training through a cafe of sorts to visually challenge Ethiopians. They provide vocational training through a collegiate that is associated with this internet center and they organize workshops in collaboration with a lot of international organizations to be able to serve specifically people with barriers of accessibility. So they have the ability to learn in braille, their keyboards are better suited for people that are visually challenged and they provide specific like curricula and tutoring for accessibility which is a part of the adoption spectrum that we should take more cognizance of. The impact that they've had is that they've translated about 2,000 texts into braille which obviously allows for more content to be accessed by people that have little or no access to this information otherwise. They train about 30 visually challenged people a year and they provide access to hundreds to the cafe that they've set up in Addis Ababa in particular. They've created or they've galvanized the movement around accessibility especially in Africa which again is a huge like momentum building factor that ought to be taken into consideration. The key takeaways from this presentation that I wanted to quickly summarize is that like connectivity, like I started my presentation with is more than just an infrastructural technical issue. There's a supply side barrier, sure, but there are also demand side barriers and we should keep that in mind while thinking about ways to connect unconnected communities or thinking about technologies to connect unconnected communities. There are innovative ways, I think I've presented about a dozen of them to bridge this adoption gap that exists but it's important to realize that like there is a lot of learning that can happen from local and context specific solutions that have been implemented. When doing this research, one of the biggest takeaways that I have had personally is that there are a lot of these organizations that aren't aware of similar organizations that are working in this area and may have resources to share. It might be in the form of digital literacy curricula, it might be in the form of actual, like implementation advice on specific topology, it might be in the form of how they galvanize volunteers to do some of their workshops and that kind of knowledge sharing can be really useful and I hope if some of you are considering either like working in this space that you will learn from some of the experiences that I have shared and I'm happy to put you in touch with the organizations that have been mentioned. The other thing that I want to emphasize and stress and I will illustrate this in a few last examples is that there might be a necessity to combine approaches. So recently I did an interview and this is not covered as a formal case study as yet in our research. I did an interview with an organization in Kenya called Tuna Panda Institute whose primary focus has been to create like to do digital literacy especially ICT training for entrepreneurs in a slum in Kenya. They realized very quickly that just providing them like training was not necessarily useful because they were constrained in terms of capacity by the room that they had in the institute. So they decided to now expand to create a community network in the slum so that like of 300,000 people in like that and in other slums in Kenya are able to get access on the supply side through the community network to content on the internet and to Wi-Fi hotspots that they can then access information through. So it's often that you need both supply side and demand side solutions to certain problems and the main example is again one of those examples where demand side like solutions such as digital literacy training is tacked on to the supply side solution providing them with their first connectivity to ensure that you have quick uptake and better uptake of the things that are provided. The other thing to note is that at a lot of times there might be a need to combine axillary products like for instance solar charging stations to these deployments. An example that I'm currently studying in Rwanda is a deployment by a company called Vandu which is trying to deploy solar powered small cell architecture in rural parts of Rwanda that have no coverage and they are like realizing that and our realization is that there has been a lot of these villages that have no electricity whatsoever. So it's often important to think about power sources and their ability of the people to access power while also providing them with connectivity infrastructure especially in some context like in Rwanda where connectivity rollout has far exceeded their electricity. Okay, I think we miss Charada for one second there. Charada, are you there? Yes, I am here right now. I was just saying that I'm happy to take questions because there may be any for the last 10 minutes. Okay, perfect. I think we missed that last part but I'm sure we got like most of the information of the key takeaways. Thank you so much for this amazing presentation. Personally, this is one of my main interests being a telecommunications engineer and working in ITC for development. So I'm really thankful that you presented all these interesting case studies. I have a couple of questions for you and we will leave the rest of the people to also ask questions while I ask you some of these questions. Please, again, if you have any questions put it in the Q&A and I will make sure to ask them to Charada. So the first question I had for you was you being in the field and for everyone out there, you have the privilege to talk to Charada who is in the field at the moment in Myanmar so she's doing these case studies as we speak. And what is the best example that you have seen in the field? So I know you mentioned community networks, you mentioned TV, white spaces. What is the best example? The one that you think has more or promise more for other implementations in other contexts? So I think- Especially the demand side. Yeah, on the demand side. Yeah. I think that, okay, I think on the demand side in particular, digital literacy training is a very amorphous term. So the best implementation often, I think is one that can be developed in collaboration with local context organizations and local community members. A lot of the organizations that we speak to in all of these contexts say that especially on the demand side, it's important to have a local trainer that you train, have a person from within the community that can be trusted to teach these skills. But also I think it's important not to be like blown away by a very fancy app-based training very easily. It's often that you need to teach them utility-based training. For instance, instead of teaching a person to learn how to write emails or how to use Microsoft Word, if you teach them the same thing with a purpose, say how do you apply for a job using emails? That might be a very useful way to conduct digital literacy training. In fact, we heard that in one of our case studies, Comcast, I think if I'm not wrong, said that they saw a quick uptake or a jump in uptake of digital literacy training. The minute they moved from very basic how to turn on, turn off computer and how to use basic applications to saying, how do you get a job on the internet? Or how do you sell your goods on the internet? And that kind of packaging in terms of digital literacy and ICT skills, I think makes a huge difference as long as it is very tailored to the local context. The other thing that I would say on the demand side is that it's important to have a more comprehensive picture beyond the basic skills. So things like protection from harassment, things like privacy and security and safety online should also be basic bare minimum that is covered in digital literacy modules. That's currently not the case, but often we hear that those are the kinds of things that people hesitate. When I spoke in the fields to villagers, they often have a hesitation to access parts of the internet because they associate them with bad things. And that's something that we should try to like, PM or try to at least educate people about through our digital literacy initiatives, whatever they may be. That's very interesting. It's interesting for me also that you highlight so much the supply side, because when we often hear connecting the unconnected, you always hear white spaces and all the demand side kind of initiatives. So there's one demand side question that we have in the Q and A from Catherine. Was there any pushback from regulators or service providers to use the TV white spaces? Different countries have had different experiences. India, for instance, currently has had faced huge pushback in terms of giving anything more than experimental license for TV white space projects. There is one TV white space testbed that is currently in operation and they are unsure. It's by IIT Bombay off the coast of, in the Gujarat Maharashtra border for those who are interested. But they are unsure if they will have the experimental license renewed or will be able to get any commercial license. On the other, and this has been from incumbent service providers. On the other hand, you see other countries that have had really good progress on TV white space regulation. Malawi comes to mind. I know Ghana and South Africa also have regulations that are in the process of consultation on regulation that are quite progressive and do allow for dynamic spectrum allocation to be a thing which allows for TV white spaces to be utilized. So in general, you don't think there's that much pushback from regulators or incumbent service providers? Again, it's hard to generalize. I would say that there are instances of pushback but not always. Okay, and another question I have from TV white spaces is are the equipment for TV white spaces expensive because as we know, the normal telecom hardware is very expensive. So how are these, in the case studies that you have seen, how are they funding and making it sustainable over time to maintain? So in a lot, if not majority of the TV white spaces that we have currently worked with, Microsoft has been a partner in some way or the other. They have been actually pushing for the adoption of TV white spaces more broadly. And they do get a lot of funding from the affordable access grants program that Microsoft runs. And Microsoft also has a TV white spaces like research arm that does a lot of collaborations with a lot of these. So the Malawi data went, I think was also like converted to the dynamic spectrum allocation table after collaboration, et cetera, with Microsoft. The, in terms of the router cost, yes, it is expensive, $5,000 to $6,000 per router, if I am not wrong, currently, which is quite high. And you like, and this is for ubiquity gear, but there is like, there are indigenous implementations that are, that we are currently studying. The Indian case is fascinating because the Indian case decided that the commercially available gear, which is primarily cars and adaptor or ubiquity is too expensive for them. So they built their own router. And in fact, I'm currently in the process of doing a cost effectiveness analysis of the deployment. These are the unlicensed spectrum deployment that they're also doing in parallel, which is proving to be slightly more cost in this, like slightly more costly for the reason that they have to depend on commercially available gear at the 2.4 and the 5.8 gigahertz spectrum. That's very interesting. So in India, they're kind of building their own hardware for the white spaces. Yes, yes, they're building their own router and it's currently being tested and piloted, but it's showing promise. The question still remains to be seen on whether or not they will get approval to use it beyond experimental purposes. That's super interesting. I hope they do get the approval because it sounds very promising. Okay, so aside from that, Shrad, I have one last question. I have two actually, and let's see if we can cover them. So the first one will be for community networks. I thought that was almost like democratizing the access to internet and having people from grassroots come with like we need this, like let's get together and work on it. Do you think at the long run, that's sustainable in terms of finance? Like as I mentioned already in a couple of times, I think my main concern or the concern of the sector is the financial sustainability of networks that are not connected to the bigger grid and to the telcos. So what are your thoughts about the financial sustainability of community networks as large or like mesh networks, WiFi mesh networks? So I actually think that a lot of the case studies that I've been studying show that financial sustainability can be attained in the long run of community networks as long as there is community buy-in. So in a lot of the community networks that I'm studying, there are like you need to attain like community and volunteer buy-in to be able to sustain the network, not just like financially, but also just physically sustain the network. The most successful example of a cost sharing mechanism for a community network that has been developed and studied extensively is the WiFi network deployment in Spain which has over 30,000 visible nodes and 44,000 in like total nodes if I'm not wrong. And that's like serving Catalonia. So yes, it is possible it's been active for so long like it's been active for almost 13 years now, 2004 if I'm not wrong. So it's possible, but I think a lot of the challenges that I've heard of when speaking to organizations that run community networks is volunteer buy-in. People don't want to contribute. People don't want to set up the routers or maintain the routers. People don't want to do the cost sharing. It's often a social problem, not necessarily a financial, sustainability problems or financial perspective. Okay, that's so interesting. Mikesh's answer or Kumar, I don't know what is the first name. Is there any way in which students can contribute to these projects? To the projects themselves, depends on the organization and depends on where you're based. But a lot of these organizations, especially if someone's in India, I know that there's digital empowerment foundation that does a lot of community networking in India and I'm happy to put them in touch with those people. The IIT Bombay deployment also, I think has some student involvement. But like I said, there are opportunities you probably need to be more specific about your needs and I'm happy to put you in touch with people that might be able to help. Perfect. Everyone has their Charada's email. We put it out there in the slide. We want to thank you for participating in Charada. Thank you so much for the work that you're doing for the space and for joining our webinar. Thank you so much. Thank you, it's been a pleasure. Thank you, everyone.