Bridging Digital Divide: ‘Village wireless LAN’, a low cost network infrastructure solution for digital communication, information dissemination & education in rural Bangladesh

Our research targets the lack of ICT infrastructure in rural areas of Bangladesh. The research has the project to build a solar powered, low cost, fully fledged computer server from off-the-shelf components which will act as a network infrastructure for data collection, sharing and network distribution in rural areas of Bangladesh, even where electricity consistency is an issue. It is designed to create a Wi-Fi (2.4GHz) based network around the deployed area effectively creating a High Speed Local Area Network and provide ICT based services such as File Sharing, Instant Messaging, E-Education, Form Submission and a platform for any other on demand web & database services that are required by the community. The research is dedicated to bridging the Digital Divide. The objectives includes (i) building a low cost server using off-the-shelf, low cost hardware and open source software (ii) Provide a high speed data communications network effectively creating a Local Area Network (iii) Run the entire system on an incredibly low power requirement of 3.5 Watts. (iv) Provide a service layer for web services which supports Ajax, php5, MySQL (v) Deploy open source web services for data exchange and communication (vi) provide a system that has low & quick maintenance capabilities, (vii) and finally allow optional cellular (3G) data connectivity to allow the people to have shared internet access.