Internet is Back!

So after Lydia left (see the initial setup in this post) there seemed to be some mishaps with the internet in Lwemodde. The dish was not providing a strong signal and their modem did not appear to work. They traded the Airtel one for a UTL modem in the hope that that would provide a better situation. I think they were given some crappy useless modem – didn’t seem to work.

They still had the router that they bought from the Airtel shop which will route internet from the USB modem to their three computers. Their netbooks are basically just a smartphone with a keyboard and large screen. They run Android’s Jelly Bean 4.1 operating system which means they are basically only useful for browsing the web. This is why they were so cheap I assume. The battery life is close to 0 and you don’t have to pay for the MAC or MS OS. Just being able to browse the internet is fine though for the majority of their purposes. Their third computer was brought in by Junior. It is a Pentium 4 and it runs Windows XP. We can connect it to the router via ethernet and it works just fine.

While we were setting up everything and testing out the computers, the power, as it always does in Uganda, went out and so we did what we loved to do – run things from our solar utility node. We quickly connected the router’s power port to the 5 V phone chargers that are powered by the12 V battery. The netbooks also run off 5 V provided that you dedicate an entire charger to each of them since they draw 2 A each. The router and the computers worked off solar power and so even in periods of long blackout they should have no trouble accessing the internet.

So, how did we get internet to function? I explained the setup in this way to them. There are 3 connections that need to be made.

1. Modem to 3G cell network. (Actually we can only get 2G out there)

2. Modem must be able to talk to the router.

3. Wifi connection from computers to router.

I worked backwards starting with connection 3 and making my way to 1. I explained the concept of IP addresses and how to access the router once a wifi connection is made. That would be to open a browser and go to address 192.168.0.1. Once we logged into the router I explained what the different settings were, the difference between WAN and LAN and how to check on the status of the modem. That brought us to connection 2. After that was understood we tried to perfect connection 1.

Now just plugging the modem into the router where it sat initially actually did allow for a 2G connection and internet was accessible. It was just unusably slow. In different locations it was slightly faster and slower. We tried putting the modem at the focus of the satellite dish and moving it a bit from side to side We actually got less reception (0 bars) compared to inside (2 bars). My thinking was that it was too fiddly and uncertain to use a perfect parabolic dish at this stage so we focused on moving the modem on the inside of their shop. Bizarrely, the best reception was towards the back of their shop.

That night I went home and used my internet to research methods of improving 3G signal. I quickly came across this video. In the video you will see that pretty decent signal enhancement can be attained by just putting the modem in a saucepan. Yes, this is not parabolic and not focal at all but I think the theory is that you will capture some waves in a wide area and just make them bounce in a fashion which is more likely to hit the modem antenna. I stressed to them that it was important to use a metal pot to allow for this bouncing of EM waves to occur.

The next day we found a pot, as you will see in the pictures below, and tested it. Outside of the pot we couldn’t load the page http://speedof.me which is a simple speed test website. Just a side note, I have never understood why http://speedtest.net thought it was a good idea to fill their page with heavy flash scripts to just do a speed test. If you are doing a speed test it is likely that you don’t have much speed in the first place…..why therefore make the page full of unnecessary data. Seems really stupid.

Junior (left) and Betty (right) testing out the net. You can see the modem in a cooking pot. This was one of our best locations.  As Murphy would have it, it is in the most inconvenient place.

Inside the pot, at the very back of the room, we got 0.03 Mbps speed on average. This was after about 3 tests. Our best location gave us 0.13 Mbps and we were able to stream bits of YouTube video. Junior was very happy to see his favorite music video playing.

I told them to just keep experimenting. Use different sized pots, place the modem in different places in the pot and place the pot in different places at different angles. It will just be a lot of trial and error but I think their internet may just become useable. This is a pretty cool service for them. The closest internet for the surrounding villages is in Kalisizo, and even then it barely works there.

Here you can see all three computers. The router is on top of the monitor.

Two coffee farmers which wandered into the shop got to see the Wikipedia page for coffee for the first time ever.

They also found an article about Ugandan coffee exports going up 7% in the last year.

More internet!

Now that internet is at Lwemodde it will be easy for them to contact Lydia and myself about questions they have or simply research the answers themselves. They still want something to help them learn to type rapidly and so I will work on something which doesn’t use the internet for that. I was thinking of just coding something simple in JavaScript which will run in the browser. That will allow for basic graphics and it should function on all three computers. I can attach the HTML page in an email and they can load it on each computer.