Normally you'd expect a first-week trip report to be full of frustrating stories of things not working, but aside from drilling through one of the motherboards we brought we've been making smooth and steady progress. We set up our first base station the day we arrived. WamenaCom uses a pole strapped to a tree next to the school to provide Internet access to the community, so we decided to mount our base station there too. After a bit of impressive tree climbing by the WamenaCom and Misionaris Sekolahin folks, the first VBTS was powered, networked, and installed, and we were able to make test calls.
e! Coverage has exceeded our expectations, with our single base station able to provide strong signal to central Desa, even reaching the neighboring town of Kota about a mile away across a valley.
Word that cell phone signal is going to be available in Desa has spread like wildfire throughout the community and neighboring villages (well, like wildfire would spread if not for all the rain we've been having). We've still got a lot of work left to do to make the network reliable before we can open up the network and start selling SIM cards to people. Since that first day, we've set up outgoing calling, built a billing system for the network (our friends at WamenaCom will be maintaining this network in the long term, so we want it to be financially sustainable) and done a *lot* of performance and reliability tuning, which is vital since our only connection to the outside world is a VSAT connection. We also have been doing training with WamenaCom on building ISP-grade long-distance WiFi networks; we'll be using the long-distance WiFi network they're building to connect our next VBTS installations in neighboring towns back to our central hub in Des.
Looking towards Desa from Kota (Desa is in the center right of the image).Setting up the long-distance WiFi relay in Kota with WamenaCom.Everyone we've interacted with is very excited that they'll be able to use their cell phones for calls and SMS around Desa, whether to communicate with family in other parts of Indonesia or just to send messages across the valley (a trip that can take hours of hiking up and down steep and slippery hillsides). We're looking forward to working with WamenaCom, Misionaris Sekolahin, and the rest of the community here to deploy VBTS over the next few months.
