What We Could Do

Bismillah,

At least there's one thing that people tend to think of how IT (Information Technology) provides wealth factor increment; it enables fast information flow and thus presenting more knowledge to others who might be needing it instantly. This knowledge is furthermore used as a basis of any kind of developments.

Imagine how people communicate with the others via conventional methods such as letters or postal services. Updated informations given are now obsolete -if you see what I mean, you might notice when you are sending news at present date to those in rural areas ... your news would be received within months!!- and that's dangerous, why ... because the time delay causes slow informations receive. As time goes by the more loss of information will occur. One of the consequence is ... some people will know that internet DOES exist long after people strive to discover new kind of NGN (Next Generation Network); seamless, high speed, and sustainable technology.

A new concept of NGN provided for rural communities in Indonesia might be introduced by my former thesis adviser ... Dr.Ir. Armein Z.R. Langi. The idea is how to provide a cheap yet effective technology for rural areas, so that the digital divide among metropolitan cities and develop-underdeveloped cities is no longer exist. This might take time and tremendous effort also support from the government regarding the policy, regulations, and standardization but doing nothing means be nothing no ? Technically ... this concept is viable and feasible.

The concept of this social purpose NGN or known to us as rural-NGN can be shown below:

pic 1. r-NGN concept

Picture 1 shows how the overall network will be established. Of course, according to the picture multimedia services can be provided. We're looking forward a broadband wireless access which speed is more than 2 Mbps, the choice goes to Linksys WRT54G 802.11b/g Wi-Fi .

Me, Salman Teguh Pratista, S.Kom, MT; Ahmad Meiriansyah, ST, MT; Akmal Hidayat, S.Si and some WiNNERs are implementing Wireless Mesh Network as a pilot project for r-NGN. The idea is ... what if we implement hybrid mesh-infrastructure network instead of dedicated wireless network only. And after some measurements and calculations ... we obtain a steady level of 15-16 Mbps throughput; far more than we expected.

But alas ... a different vendor of wireless adapter caused a significant drop of throughput. This of course will be a major problem.

The concept of wireless mesh network can be seen in picture 2 below:

pic 2. Wireless Mesh Network

As you can see from picture 2 above, each node corresponds to another and whenever a node is not present due to some circumstances, another node would update its routing table so that the data packet can be transferred through another route.

Now that this pilot project is on the go ... we expect another development to improve its performance and coverage. Later on this project would be carried on in Eastern of Indonesia which needs more concern on IT development.

--Dimas