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First try, and first fail.

A project log for MeshPoint - wifi router for humanitarian crisis

Autonomous, smart, wifi mesh router which is easy to use by humanitarian NGO first responders during humanitarian or natural disasters.

valent-turkovicValent Turkovic 06/11/2017 at 23:210 Comments

How it all started

In August of 2015 whole Europe was part of unprecedented humanitarian crisis in which hundreds of thousand Syrian refugees were fleeing from their war stricken country in hope to save their lives and for a better future.

Overwhelming numbers of Syrian refugees that wanted to enter the EU surprised all humanitarian NGOs and caught them off guard.

What we saw in the news and at the border crossing was total chaos...

When humanitarian or natural disasters occur the need to communicate is immediate. We have witnessed first hand how the children who are most vulnerable are affected because rescue teams are not prepared to tackle this issue. Current solutions are too slow, require highly trained people to deploy it, don't scale and are very expensive.

Because mobile networks were not designed to handle such big number of people (refugees, teams from multiple humanitarian organisations, police and volunteers) in small area the whole system collapsed and you couldn't call anyone or get data connection up to the Internet.

First try and first fail

Out first try was with few routers in backpacks with batteries and 3G modems. This approach mostly didn't work. But what we was in the field was just how important it was for refugees to get any kind of connectivity so that they could use their smart phones to let their families and friend know they are aright.

Survey conducted by International Rescue Comity showed that first question that refugees asked when they landed on Greek islands was "Where am I?", second question was "Do you have Wifi?" and only the third question was "Where do I get food and water?".

Communication taking precedence over food and water showed us just how important it was for refugees to stay in contact with their families and friends.

Out approach mostly failed, because we were trying to connect via 3G modem towers that were not designed to handle this much people trying to use the network at the same time.

Silver lining

What we saw in the field also shocked us, it wasn't only us who were trying and failing to setup Internet connection during this humanitarian crisis, but also all the teams from the biggest humanitarial NGOs were also failing. We saw Greenpeace, Red Cross, Unicef and other teams from smaller organisations trying to setup any kind of communication with their HQs but they didn't succeed what ever they tried.

This is what motivated us to try even harder and try different approaches and different pieces of equipment.

We found out that 4G network was not overcrowded so after getting LTE 4G modems we managed to get uplink to the internet.

After that we also managed to connect to 3G towers but we used long range antennas to connect to remote towers instead of local ones which were overcrowded and not working.

Now we had Internet but all most wifi routers we tried couldn't handle more that 20-30 people at once. One NGO team is around 20 people, and also there were few thousands of destitute people, children and whole families who asked us for Internet access...

So first part of the puzzle fit in place, but this was only first piece. We knew we were on the right path, but there was still lot of work to be done.

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