In parallel to our initial field surveys, I also setup a mini electronics lab in Samphal-la’s home. We occupy one empty room in his house and organize it so that all tools and inventory is easily accessible.

Erratic power is a constant annoyance to our progress. The moment my soldering iron fights its way through low voltage to get hot enough to melt solder, we have a sudden power cut. Whats worse, every single mesh node’s battery pack and its associated circuitry are badly damaged during shipping, so they must be remade almost from scratch, and much more sturdily than before. This adds to our work. We realize that we need to look for another place for setting up a lab, or perhaps purchase an inverter. We talk to Geshe-la about this and soon enough, he speaks to Namgyal-la, director of SECPAD school and he finds us a room in his school’s hostel building. At first we are a bit hesitant at the thought of moving the lab outside the village, but after seeing that they have a reliable solar powered backup system, we shift there. We also have tens of additional onlookers — curious kids wondering what we’re up-to. Slowly, our work gets up to speed and some confidence builds in our ability to be able to pull this off.

Field testing

After repairing the first few mesh nodes, a critical moment comes — the very first long distance test. Our test setup consists of a domino core based mesh node plus a selection of three antennas on one end which I would hold up from a rooftop in Langmi.

A simple omni directional antenna, which looks like a little plastic rod sticking out from mass market routers.

A tin can antenna, or a cantenna, fashioned from old tin cans we found at a scrap dealer.

A mash up of a cantenna and a mass market satellite-tv antenna. This is our most powerful antenna in terms of directional gain.

Mesh testing bare essentials. Keep water handy… always!

On the other end is a satellite tv mashup antenna which Prasenjit, Ishan and Geshe-la took with them across the river near Padum on a little hilltop called Pibiting. An aerial distance of about five kilometers. An additional challenge with tv-dish antennas is that they are off-axis which makes it that much harder to test because the signal that is transmitted is not perpendicular to the antenna’s plane but tilted at an angle. To get around this, we paste a small wooden stick on the rod between the cantenna and the dish to point in in the direction of the transmitted signal.

Prasenjit heading to Pibiting with one mesh node

Soon the big moment comes and all the nervous excitement that has built up over the past few weeks comes to a head at this moment. In all our testing, we hadn’t tested live VoIP calling over such a setup and frankly I’m a bit afraid we’re going to run into problems. We set a rough time when we will begin the test at both ends as fallback if communication completely fails. At the appointed hour, I make my way up to the roof of Samphal-la’s home. I stand holding two phones in my hand — one, an old nokia feature phone connected to the 2G network in the area, and the other, a smartphone connected to my end of the mesh network over wifi. As I adjust the dish I hold to point it in the general direction of Pibiting, and fiddle with my nokia phone to call Prasenjit over GSM, I receive a call on the other phone! I pick it up, and like magic, I hear his voice — clear, noise free, unblemished. Before we actually grasp the depth of what just happened, we pass the phone around so that the local zanskari people with us in the moment also get to experience what just happened. I get to speak with Geshe-la, and I can’t but help sense a bit of shock in his voice — It’s as if he is expressing ‘I can hear Anish’s voice from five kilometers away using equipment built from discarded batteries, throwaway tin cans and satellite-tv dishes on a shoestring budget.’ In a moment, the prospect of a long distance mesh network becomes a real possibility! Measurements of signal quality and strength are beyond impressive.

After this eureka moment, we realign our plans to seriously start thinking about deployment. I focus next on building a large battery pack for the Intel NUC based internet-in-a-box, and we discuss deployment details. Moving from handheld antennas to installed infrastructure.

Roll-out

We make a deployment plan after meeting various people in the different villages we intend to provide mesh connectivity to. There will be two primary backbones of the network — one between Karsha and Padum, and the other between Karsha and Langmi. Later, if time and inventory allows, we might consider a link between Langmi and Padum so that the network can start more accurately resemble mesh topology. The job of these primary routers would be to forward packets to other mesh nodes, but not directly to users. A number of secondary mesh nodes would be installed to facilitate that, which would mesh with these primary nodes and also provide a WiFi access point to users. Me and Ishan focus more on this work, while Prasenjit starts thinking about media collections on the NUC.

For me and Ishan, the next few days are spent mostly outdoors. We wake up earlier than usual, make a plan for the day, go to our lab in SECPAD, pick up equipment, and be on our way. During this time, assistance from Samphal-la, Mingyur-la and Angdus-ji, a school teacher in Zanskar and our neighbour in Langmi, is invaluable. They help us acquiring the materials necessary to secure the mesh node dishes with a cement foundation, find carpenters who can create boxes for us, and generally give us tips on how to best secure the things we are installing. It was heart-warming to see them take ownership where they feel they understand the task well enough, and remain curious to know more about what they don’t.

Yep! That’s an approaching dust storm

Through the next couple of weeks, we go about installing one mesh node after another. Work is tiring but rewarding. Prasenjit writes scripts that helps to monitor the state of the network and log it over time — which might provide invaluable insight when we look back at this project. We suffer a bit from mission creep as we discover there is far more interest in the mesh network than we had imagined. From time to time, Geshe-la comes to us asking whether it would be possible to setup another node in some place or another, and we have to constantly re-evaluate our plan balancing short term deployment over long term sustainability. We feel hard at times that we have to push back against such requests because we want to first evaluate performance, and only then commit to a broader performance. At the same time, we work hard to improve media and user interaction on the internet-in-a-box. Prasenjit figures out how to make searchable collections of content with the resources that we have available, and we go about replacing simple file listings on blank web pages with a proper web interface. Ishan designs a beautiful homepage and microsite in wordpress that replaces the conventional IIAB frontpage. He searches within the content that’s already on the IIAB to find thumbnails, photos, detailed descriptions and stirs up a compelling user interface we are all very impressed with. With Geshe-la’s help, we also make a Tibetan-language version of that website, and he also uploads many Tibetan and Buddhist texts onto the IIAB.

During the last days of our stay, we organize a mesh workshop and invite about ten people whom we interacted with through the summer to do a step by step walk-through of everything that’s been done. The purpose of this is to both do a knowledge transfer, and build a spirit of ownership. We are very stretched for time and are only able to do this over one afternoon; something that I’m afraid we should have devoted more time to with the benefit of hindsight. Still, we feel confident enough that the mesh will work for at least some time, and already have an impressive collection of statistics collected over our final two weeks in Zanskar.

* * *