LokVaani: demonstrating interactive voice in Lo3
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2010 conference
Proceedings of the First ACM Symposium on Computing for Development
NSDR '11 Proceedings of the 5th ACM workshop on Networked systems for developing regions
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In India, the rural teledensity is just 37% and there are a large number of villages which do not have cellular coverage to this day but many such villages are only a few km away from the cellular coverage. Exploiting these cellular points near villages, we present a low cost and low power gateway system to extend the cellular coverage into the rural areas. Specifically, we develop and demonstrate a low cost, low power 802.15.4 gateway which can connect a number of villages in its vicinity to the cellular backhaul. In prior work, we designed a low cost, low power, local voice (called as Lo3) system using 802.15.4 technology. Lo3 system enabled villagers inside a village to communicate with each other. In this demo, we show that, using the gateway node, the 802.15.4 handsets of Lo3 system enable villagers to establish real-time voice calls from/to the village to/from the outside world. We test deployed our system in Ahupe village near Mumbai, India for 18 hours over 3 days, and received positive response from the villagers.