Projeto - Fumaça Data Springs
Projeto enviado para Commotion
The idea is to cover the district of Fumaça (Resende, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil) - a village of about 800 inhabitants, which currently has no fixed or cell phone communications. However, it does have an open wifi point in the main square, provided by the state government. The problem is that due to the topography of the area, only the neighbours who live next to the square are able to access the network. Also, the population is mostly old, and is not used to communication devices other than fixed and mobile phones.
The project would have the local coordination of Nuvem, an open lab present in the region since 2011 (see description below), and the technical expertise of Cuni LLera and Sr. Cano, both with long experience in wireless networks and new experience in GSM networks. Network will be planned by our experts, but build togheter with local people who, after a training time, will be the maintainers of the network.
Fumaça is a community with strong bonds. The neighbours get together for communal tasks such as building houses and harvesting. Right now there is a collective effort to protect the local water springs, with the support of the state government, and Nuvem is part of it. The local primary school, which is located next to the square, will be one of the main partners for the project, as well as the agricultural state agency, both institutions being former partners of Nuvem.
Fumaça is also the locality of last descendants of the ancient indigenous nation of puris that have mixed with people of other ethnics groups but saving their own culture. The project will improve the spread of their cultural productions by themselves. It is also the location of Nebulosa, a property that is being developed as the base for Nuvem's most agricultural and architectural activities. It also currently lacks Internet connectivity, so many of the meetings and workshops we do there are hindered and would profit from the project.
Thus, we want to propose the creation of a mesh network designed and maintained by the local community, that could reach at least 80% of the villagers. We'll cover a radius of 3 km with several mesh nodes. This network would connect to the Internet through the village's open wifi access point. We also want to foster the production and sharing of local content by means of a village server, installed physically in the primary school, for chat, voice communications, file sharing and local content such as an online radio and news publishing. This server will be also accessible through internet to allow the rest of the world to connect to our village that actually doesn't provide our own contents. Last, we will install a GSM station which would allow the use of regular cell phones through VoIP connections, managed by the neighbours.
For outdoors we will use Ubiquiti NanoStation Loco M2 and Nanobridge M5 22db that were tested before with Commotion and they are 802.12n and MIMO supported for outdoors. For indoors we're going to use TP-Link TL-WDR3600 which is cheaper biband indoor router that you can buy in Brasil.
As is it standard practice with Nuvem projects, the whole process will be documented and shared in our wiki (below), so that it can be replicated elsewhere.
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