The Golden Age of Wireless

Day one of the Summit included tours that allowed us to see both the installation of radio's and attennae and the manner in which community groups are using the Internet connection provided by Air Jaldi. There were three tours, ranging from a "strenuous trek" to an "easy bus tour". I chose the easy option , which turned out to be strenuous to me, since it lasted 8 hours, after my 5am arrival from a 12 hour hit-your-head-on-the-roof-of-the-bus bumpy ride from Delhi, which directly followed 30 hours of travel time from San Diego.

The pictures here show Dawa, one of my tour guides at an Air Jaldi antenna; a garden at the Norbulingka Institute for Tibetan Culture; play at the Lower Tibetan Children's Village (TCV) campus; open lab hours at a the most remote TCV campus; and a one of the artists at work in the Norbulingka studios.

My tour was incredibly informative and, from comparing notes with others, it seems all the tours were equally jam-packed with info and experiences. From the roof of the Lower TCV, we were able to see the Omni-Directional antennae 20km away that help make the mesh network redundantly reliable. At Norbulingka, Dawa explained that web developers have their own servers and use them to continue growing the world's largest archive of Tibetan culture. This includes storing and editing video footage that gets included in productions sent out to support the Dalai Lama's work. We were also treated to a wonderful Tibetan lunch here and got much education on Tibetan cultural practice and the life of Buddha from our guide Hans, who seems to know everything.

While some of the sites we visited could get their service directly from the National Telcom, BSN, the campus where I took the lab picture is so remote (think about it, when there's a place that other places in the foothills of the Himalayas describe as remote, it's really remote) that they would not be able to have service at all without Air Jaldi. Possibly dial-up, but that would be even more unreliable than BSN's DSL service which drops connections constantly.

It's worth noting that Air Jaldi uses wireless to get the Internet connection around the hills of Dharamsala, but the service sites themselves are all set up with wired networks.