Introduction:Nepal Wireless Networking Project was informally started in 2001 by Mahabir and a team of international volunteers to connect Nangi village and a few neighboring villages to the Internet for communication purpose only. Now it is officially run by E-Networking Research and Development for introducing ICT services in rural areas of Nepal It is inspired by the social cause for the socio economic transformation of rural villages in Nepal by optimum use of Information and Communication technologies. It is promoting wireless technologies connecting rural side to urban areas so that the transfer of technologies from urban to rural areas of Nepal. would be possible through Internet and Intranet. The project is using wireless frequency of 5.8 GHz and 2.4 GHz of ISM band, which is de-licensed by Nepal Government.
Goals:
Education:
It is Increasing quality educational opportunities in rural schools and communities by creating tele-teaching and tele-training program, and by making e-learning materials in local language available to students, teachers and villagers through e-libraries.
Tele-medicine:
In Nepal, there is acute shortage of doctors. The people to doctor’s ratio is approximately 6000: 1. At this situation even there is no health post in remote rural villages. To take basic facilities of quality health services in rural area Nepal wireless project is running tele-medicine projects through 8 centers. These eight centers Nangi, Paudwar, Tolka, Dolakha, Pharping, Jomsom, Trisuli and Nepal Medical College are connected by the wireless network with the Kathmandu Model Hospital located at Kathmandu.
Communication:
It is increasing communication facilities in rural areas by providing IP telephone services, make Internet available for online text/voice/video chatting using application such as Skype, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger etc, and email communication.
Wireless Networking Training:
NW provides the complete training course to design, run and maintain WISP (Wireless Internet Service Provider). The training package minimally contains setting up Access Point, Client, Managing Bandwidth, IP sub netting, Line of Sight Calculation, Link Budget Calculation and Firewall control.
Local e-commerce:
It is helping villagers to buy and sell their products in the local market and international market through local intranet and Internet using e-commerce application.
E- Commerce:
With the connection of internet network in the remote villages people are not only using internet for VoIP but also using it to raise their economic standard through e- business. The villagers communicate each other from one village to another through internet to sell the live stocks, dairy products and local handicrafts. With the connection of internet the villagers have also able to promote their local areas for tourism destination. They have now started a process to book the hotels of the trekking trail through the internet. The local community owned hotels are also using internet for their business promotions. Remittance covers the 30 percent income of Nepal. The rural connection established by Nepal wireless has helped people to establish money transfer stations in their own village. Nepal Wireless has also signed a MoU with Thamel.com to establish virtual ATM machines along the trekking trails. So that tourist can get the money in the village and the spending rate become high.
Weather Station:
Local temperature, wind speed, wind direction, visibility, humidity etc of remote hilly and mountain regions is recorded, stored in the server and can be view online. NW has installed three whether stations till date. They are Khopra weather station, Jomsom weather station, Imja weather station. These weather stations are also continuously supplying the local weather data to airport like Pokhara Airport, Jomsom Airport etc.
