CELLPHONES are changing lives for the better across the developing world, allowing farmers to use text and voice-based services to access crop and weather information, for example. But nearly half the population in rural Africa cannot access such services because of a lack of local infrastructure.
To help fix this, a team led by Elizabeth Belding at the University of California, Santa Barbara, designed a cheap, local cellular network called Kwiizya – which means "to chat" in Tonga, the native language in Zambia's Southern Province. The idea is to give a strong signal to villages which have poor, or even non-existent, coverage.
In the Zambian village of Macha, many villagers had to walk up to 5 kilometres to reach a hill where they can get a signal on their phones, says Mariya Zheleva, who led the field trials of Kwiizya. But what the village does have is a small Wi-Fi network at the local hospital.
Kwiizya uses this Wi-Fi network to relay a cell signal. Calls and text messages tend to be sent using a communications standard called GSM, but this requires expensive hardware and software to carry traffic between cell towers. Kwiizya's open-source software translates GSM calls and texts into a format that can instead be broadcast over the local Wi-Fi network. No subscription is required and any phone can use its existing SIM card to access the network, augmenting local coverage without forcing users to change anything.
In the Macha trial, the team built two simple cellphone towers 2.3 kilometres apart, connected via the hospital's existing Wi-Fi network. Kwiizya's software can also use other forms of connectivity as a backbone, including the unused parts of the television spectrum.
Kwiizya can only handle local calls for now, but that is what villagers need most. "When we told them about Kwiizya they were super-excited," says Zheleva, who presented the system at the MobiSys conference in Taiwan this week.
Tim Kelly, who works on communications policy at the World Bank, says Kwiizya is a good idea, but emphasises that it is economics, not technology, that is holding back cell coverage in rural areas. He points to a World Bank project in South Sudan where "diesel, bribes and taxes" are the biggest issues.
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