Foundation Projects

Most of the Bangladesh population uses smartphones as their primary device to access the Internet. They can neither afford to pay for high-quality cellular broadband subscription fees, nor can they bear the initial setup cost of cable broadband.

This small grant helped set up community Wi-Fi hotspots in low-income areas, where people can use high-quality and affordable broadband Internet with the mobile devices they already own. These community hotspots comprise Wi-Fi access points, wireless access gateway, broadband backhaul, innovative software, and power backup to ensure high-bandwidth uninterrupted Internet connection without data usage limits.

Micro-merchants from the communities act as hosts and marketers of these hotspots and local Internet Service Providers provide the broadband backhaul. This model provides incentives to all stakeholders to expand and maintain affordable broadband coverage for even the most disadvantaged communities.

Objectives:

The main activities conducted during the project:

• The project found 81 low-income high-density locations with broadband availability. (Target was to find 50)
• The project set up 28 community Wi-Fi zones.
• The project is collaborating with a nationwide ISP Link3 and a Student Representative in Trishal district. Discussion is underway about running a pilot with Unilever Bangladesh Limited.

Monitoring and optimizing efforts:

• The project continuously monitored the community wi-fi zones to ensure close to 100% uptime
• The project identified and documented all possible issues
• The project optimized the process of searching and selecting locations to ensure
  • The selected locations are frequently visited by community members living in the vicinity
  • People from different age groups can use the Internet at the wi-fi zones
• The project optimized its hardware-software system to ensure
  • Scalability
  • Affordability despite global price inflation
  • Higher data transfer rates
  • Support for larger number of concurrent users