fabfi hardware : Grassroots Wireless Internet Backhaul Infrastructure (fab lab com)
The fab lab project is a global grassroots community based technology education effort that is based on the notion that anyone, anywhere (regardless of prior education) has the ability to design and produce their own technological solutions. This relies on connectivity to the network of other fab labs, for support and collaboration. A goal of fab labs is to be self sufficient, and perhaps the most critical (and first) project towards this aim has been to use the fab lab to make long distance wireless network infrastructure, in order to connect to other labs and the internet (fab lab com).
The fabfi reflector came out of the fact that economies of scale had resulted in the global availability of low cost household wifi routers. These routers can be loaded with open source and free (GNU) software that allows groups of them to operate as a sophisticated network backbone. However, with a range of around thirty meters, traversing low population density areas with these routers is not quite feasible. The fabfi reflector is a parabolic wireless signal reflector that boosts this range to over ten kilometers. The chassis is freestanding, incorporates a router mount, and can be made with any locally available sheet material (such as old plywood), by anyone with access to an inexpensive cnc router table (such as is in the 100+ fab labs around the world). The reflector surface can be made from poultry fencing or chicken wire, which we have found to be available everywhere.
Aside from the technical utility of this invention, it has educational and economic functions, as well. Anything that demystifies modern technology by allowing users to make (however big or small) modifications is a big step towards empowering people to become innovators themselves.
An example of an effect on local business development is the joinAfrica project (recipient of a Legatum Center Seed Fund Grant with Keith Berkoben, MIT), a grassroots business development venture based on the ability of fab lab com projects to be agile enough to determine and establish network requirements for new regions. This is a task that the government and commercial telecom providers have trouble doing. When large scale investment is deemed viable, the community members who helped to install and maintain the fab lab com systems become go-to service providers, interfacing the public or commercial resources with community needs (the local service business sector remains, and is leveraged). If it comes to working with existing commercial providers who are interested in helping, the people have enough local knowledge to make such endeavors successful.
The fabfi project started as a collaboration with George Sergiadis (Aristotle University, GR), Neil Gershenfeld (MIT CBA), Kerry Lynn (Cisco Systems), and with the fab lab community (notably Sherry Lassiter, Haakon Karlsen of fab lab Lyngen, and Peter Bosscha of CSIR South Africa). The International Society for Community Wireless Networks has contributed significantly as a resource for the fab lab com project. Continuing work on the fab lab com project has taken several forms, such as “fabfi” (Amy Sun MIT CBA, Keith Berkoben MIT, and many others) with installations in India, Kenya, and Afghanistan, and the aforementioned joinAfrica project. Fabfi installation and development in Afghanistan, led by Amy Sun, has been featured on NPR and The New York Times.
(click here, for a video about another way to do this, in cases of emergency)