I recently received some photos back from Amy, who's back in JBad doing some FabLab management. Due to absurdly high winds and some hardware problems, the GATR ball (net uplink) was down for about two weeks, during which many of the folks downstream on the FabFi net all of a sudden realized the usefulness of the resource they had been taking for granted for a while since the last significant outage.It turns out the hospital link had been so reliable that they dumped their CDMA net, despite our admonition that the FabFi net was for research purposes only and could not be depended upon to be up all the time. Go FabFi?
Though, everyone seems very happy with access to FabFi, local participation in the maintenance and troubleshooting of the system still has a long way to go. After the GATR was restored, hospital administrators were still calling to complain that their net was down. Similarly to last time, the trouble was with plugging in cables. This time the power brick was not fully inserted into the wall. A simple push on the plug and the node hopped right back into the system. Oi.
Was it horribly frustrating that something like the above could still occur after being deployed for so long? Yes. But did Amy get mad? Nope. She channeled all of that frustration into a troubleshooting guide and an updated configuration manual.
So getting to the back to the title of this post:
As shown in the photos from the watertower above, the original plastic bag and gaff tape weatherproofing we used on the antennas (intended to last a month from mid-January) is still in use and more than a little worse for wear, but STILL the net stays up in 70+ mph winds, blistering heat and blowing sand.
These images bring two questions to mind. First, how do we jumpstart the local FabFi user community to get together and maintain the hardware? And second, why can't I get the Linksys router in my apartment to work this well?
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2 comments:
Dear Amy & Crew
I just wanted to let you know that I'm very impressed & proud of the work you are doing. I'm going to offer some advice, that I've been reluctant to offer, I don't want to take any wind out of your sails. But I figure it's important to say, and hopefully you can synthesize this into your project.
Fab-fi is telecommunictions infrastructure. It will evovled into critical infrstrutuce some day. Actually it already has in the case of your hostpital. As a wireless engineer, I'm reminded of the fact that as soon as a communictions link comes up, the interest in making that link more reliable and resilant disappears. When you guys field a communictions network for public use, build & enginner it like your life depends on it. Build it to survive as long as possible under the worst conditions. Because people probably won't get the message that it's just for R&D, when it's such a valuable tool.
@Jesse. That is indeed a good point. The challenge we have imposed on ourselves here is to impress upon the users that it's THEIR network and THEY need to learn to maintain it. The moment it becomes a community built and maintained system, it transitions from research to resource. Ultimately it is this metamorphosis that we are trying to achieve.
In that vein we have 3 new Afghan-built, Afghan-configured nodes going up right now. This is a big step toward our goal (post to follow)
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