using wifi routers in Uganda

One thing I noticed about some of the technology I encountered Uganda is that it wasn’t always designed with Ugandans in mind. This makes a certain amount of sense if you consider that there isn’t usually a strong business case to design consumer technology products for regions where low volume sales are expected. One example of such a technology is wifi routers.

Part of my work in Uganda was helping small organizations install shared internet connections using consumer wifi routers like the Linksys WRT54G. The problem with using such a device is that they are designed to a share an Internet connection with modems that have an RJ45 Ethernet connector – so DSL or cable modems – not with the “fixed wireless terminals” provided by UTL and MTN which are used throughout Uganda.

Huawei Wireless Terminal

These fixed terminal have a serial port which is connected to a computer using a serial to USB converter cable. To use a consumer wifi router with these fixed wireless terminals, you need to connect the modem to a stand-alone computer to share the internet across your organization. This leaves a portion of the wifi router unused, specificity the ‘routing’ or internet sharing capability built into these devices.

This set-up has a number of drawbacks, the biggest being the use of the stand-alone computer. Not only does it require a computer to be on any time someone wants to use the internet causing unnecessary power consumption, the computer is susceptible the following issues: viruses because most organizations use outdated, pirated copies of Windows, hard drive failures because of unreliable power and inexperienced users playing with the operating system’s configuration. All of these things can make a working network / internet connection useless very quickly as I have experienced first hand. And with a lack of expertise in most rural areas, the cost to fix such a set-up is usually significant to the small organizations that I was working with.

Just before I left Uganda, I stumbled upon a way to get around some of these problems. My plan was to make it possible to connect these fixed wireless terminals directly to a wifi router avoiding the stand-alone computer. One way to do this would involve adding a serial port directly to a Linksys WRT54GL or similar OpenWRT compatible router, using a standard serial cable in place of the expensive and often hard to find USB to serial converter cable. Obviously, the firmware would need to be upgraded to OpenWRT and would need to be configured to access the internet through the serial port instead of through the DSL or cable modem Ethernet port.

To make things easier for users, a web configuration page could be added to X-WRT with pre-configured values for MTN and UTL. Since OpenWRT is just a specialized Linux distribution, tweaks like DNS caching, web caching, etc. could be added for slow Internet connections. Another modification would be to convert the unused Ethernet port that is normally used to connect a DSL or cable modem into a regular port that can host another computer. This can be accomplished by changing some OpenWRT configuration files.

The only limitation I can think of is the serial port on the Linksys WRT54GL is limited to 115200 bps. While this was sufficient for the internet speeds in Uganda when I was there last year, finding way to accept higher speed modems should be investigated as things are always improving. Adding a USB port might be an option to deal with this problem but it would increase the price and development time as few (if any?) routers are OpenWRT and USB capable.

Since I’m no longer in Uganda, it’s almost impossible for me to work on this project, however, I thought I would post the idea here so that someone could take off with it if they are interested. If you are in Uganda and are interested in collaborating on this project, please contact me.