Digital Inclusion: What Kenya Did and India Can

"It always seems impossible until it’s done." — Nelson Mandela

A slow descent along Kenya's Western rift valley brings the faint outlines of Gakawa into view. The small Masai community in this lowland flanked by mountains had no electricity or phone lines. With hardly any rain, this was no place for cash crops. Even so, farmers did manage to grow potatoes and a little maize to feed themselves and their families. If only they had an Internet connection, great many of these farmers could have received weather forecasts and information on new sources of seeds and latest techniques in agriculture. It could also give them an accurate understanding of price trends for their crop across markets, help them negotiate better prices and, importantly, avoid cheating by middlemen. Meanwhile Gakawa’s Secondary School faced a shortage of books and the kids there had never seen a computer.

For people in Gakawa, the nearest Internet port was in Nanyuki, a market town 10 kilometers away. The cost of travel, back and forth, was around 200 Kenyan shillings, not to speak of travel tedium and its discouraging effects. And because laying fiber optic broadband cables was anyways a costly affair there was no way the rift valley could hope to be a part of the rest of the Internet world – well, at least until early 2013.

Be it a primary or secondary school, college, health clinic, library, or government service, a fast connection to the Internet was what Gakawa needed most to access knowledge, improve skills, and drive economic growth. Social entrepreneurs summed up the connectivity problem this way and decided they must find the best way forward:  

-- Gakawa needed Internet connectivity, but was expensive to wire. -- This had to be nothing short of broadband in order to have any serious impact on the community. -- The final leg of the telecom network leading to the customer ("last mile") should be free for users. -- There was no power supply, so the Internet service provider needed to work around this problem.

This seemed a tall order on the face of it. Ever since 2011, major trials had been taking place around a new approach to digital information sharing, including in Cambridge by a consortium comprising players in software and devices,  TV and Internet broadcasting, as well as telecom. Called "TV white spaces technology," the approach aimed to put unused spectrum bands between TV channels to good use by transmitting signals for Internet connectivity.

TV white spaces are provided to prevent the interference and cancellation of transmissions from TV channels seated adjacent in the spectrum. Termination of analog TV services also results in unutilized or underutilized white spaces. The white spaces information network sits across a fiber connection, a TV aerial, a TV base station, a wireless router, and end devices (e.g., smartphone, tablet, laptop). Since Gakawa lay outside the electricity grid, the white space roadmap for the region had another ingredient thrown in, namely, solar panels to power the base station by as much as 4.5 kilowatt hours of energy per day. Enough to not only run the network for a day but also charge some of the end devices and provide power backup.

The base station near Nanyuki connects back via fiber to an Internet service provider. An old-fashion TV aerial becomes something unbelievably useful here by helping transmit (white space) signals from the base station down the UHF and VHF bands to the Gakawa Secondary School – nearly 10 kilometers away. Because these bands have a range of up to 10 kilometers, compared to Wi-Fi’s 100 meters, they can provide the necessary "backhaul" to the network. Which means they deliver data to a point where a dual-band receiver in the Gakawa Secondary School can catch the signal and distribute wireless Internet via Wi-Fi airwaves to users within a 100-meter radius; end users enjoy 16 Mbps of data throughput. The  students in Gakawa Secondary School see Internet as an opportunity, unimaginable in the past. They have an electronic waterfall of knowledge and information floating like a mist on to them. This includes online books, distance learning programs, and other resources. They can get this information on tablets and PCs and even on low-cost smartphones, now that there is a reliable broadband around. Till now learners have had to make do without these benefits. These digital assets help prepares students for better-paying and more prestigious jobs, while the go-getters among them will set up their own Internet-based businesses in the future. The school has a Facebook page up and running; the latest post says "Total transformation."  

Similar Wi-Fi hotspots have been set up at the local health clinic and library. Pilot white space deployment in three rural communities – Gakawa, Male, and Laikipia is helping bring low-cost, high-speed wireless broadband to inaccessible areas of Kenya. It is also allowing people to access information from the Internet, extend their horizons of knowledge, be more entrepreneurial, and participate in good governance. In addition, the delivery of government services, including healthcare, is becoming more efficient. The deployment is called "Mawingu" (Swahili for "cloud") and is a joint initiative by the Kenyan government, Indigo Telecom and Microsoft." Internet technology based on TV white space has also been successfully implemented in U.S. and Singapore, and is currently being tested Tanzania, South Africa and the Philippines, apart from Kenya.

Cut to India, and the biggest challenge the government faces in digitally connecting 2.5 lac gram panchayats (village councils) is the lack of a digital infrastructure. Adopting white spaces technology is a relatively simple and affordable approach. For it costs less than INR 10 lac to put in place a router for white space technology. It represents a cost-friendly answer to last mile connectivity challenges in India, especially in remote areas without electricity and other enabling infrastructure. Moreover, low density of population and low income make rural populations somewhat unattractive to commercial telecom providers.

In India, a good deal of this spectrum belongs to Doordarshan, the public service broadcaster, and the government. It is largely unused. There is need for regulatory approvals and support from different government departments before white space pilots can be rolled out successfully in India. The Federal Communications Commission (of the U.S.) was reportedly planning to make more TV band spectrum available for white space devices (devices that look up white spaces in an authorized white space database and enable transmission along these white spaces). In U.K., the licensing body for spectrum has made white space free to use.

Microsoft has submitted a proposal to the government to move forward on a pilot that will make use of white space. If the pilot achieves success, the success can be recreated across the country, and this could give a huge boost to the Digital India initiative.

Mawingu has a lesson or two for India. The project was about taking Kenyans who did not have jobs and lived in villages, and providing them with education, training, and technology to make them sustainable in their own way. The net effect was that they ended up making more money than before. It’s India’s turn now to make use of unused spectrum opportunistically to provide cheap last-mile connectivity, especially in areas that lack electricity and basic infrastructure. The scale of white spaces deployment in India is going to be much more massive and, in this effort, Mr. Mandela’s words can be a source of inspiration.