VoIP-based Intra-village Teleconnectivity: An Architecture and Case Study

Several solutions exist to bridge the last-mile gap in rural telecom. These extend a point of presence from a town to kiosks in surrounding villages. In this paper, we deal with extending teleconnectivity from these kiosks to various points inside the village. Since laying additional PSTN lines is expensive, we use a single PSTN line connected to a software exchange, and VoIP calls are carried over Ethernet or WiFi. We use soft-phones on computing devices or analog phones with adapters to make or receive calls from different parts of the village. As proof -of-concept, we deploy the proposed solution in a rural test-bed and report our experience.