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Analyzing Open-source Resources as an Alternative for Community Wireless Networks
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- Author(s) / Creator(s)
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Community Wireless Networks (CWNs) were created to fight the broad digital divide that existed and still exists throughout many places worldwide. CWNs focus on the rural areas where communities have minimum means of communication and internet access is hard to access or where it is still inaccessible at all. Mostly volunteers from communities have been responsible for creating, maintaining, and developing new ways to make these CWNs function and provide a better service or communication source for communities to incorporate into the digital world, which would bring so many positive changes. It is a complex challenge as there can usually be many obstacles that interrupt the successful rise of this kind of network. One of the main issues encountered when working with CWNs is that the software and hardware available in the market is vendor locked. This not only causes an economic drawback when upgrading software or hardware, but it mainly makes it challenging to help improve CWNs as data is not easy to manipulate on proprietary products. This data would be very helpful when improving CWNs as it would be easier to analyze and understand what the communities require. Data analysis can indicate many statistics that can be used in favor of improvements. Another major obstacle faced within the communities that build these networks is insufficient funds to maintain and perform upgrades [2]. Nevertheless, CWNs have played an essential role in providing communication resources to many populations that have long struggled to acquire contact with the digital world and internet connectivity to their communities. Figure 1 shows a clear example of the overall process and how important it is for communities to organize and get everything ready to develop a community network. It involves organization, Internet, Network mapping, Node installations, maintenance, used devices, and planification [9].
In this capstone project, open-source software and hardware will analyze how to contribute to developing and improving current and past CWNs. An alternative option of a hybrid (open-source with vendor-locked) use of software and hardware will also be considered.
Existing open-source software and hardware will be analyzed, already used in other places as part of CWNs and different types of networks, but we will mainly focus on CWNs. For CWNs, using open-source hardware and software, when possible, will lower the costs and enable the option of modifications that cannot be done on proprietary locked products. Proprietary locked products have many unused features and can cause security issues. By opting to use open-source products, the availability of modifications is much broader and can bring many benefits when using them for CWNs. -
- Date created
- 2023-04-01
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- Type of Item
- Report