FabFi is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

, city-scale, wireless

mesh networking A mesh network is a local area network topology in which the infrastructure nodes (i.e. bridges, switches, and other infrastructure devices) connect directly, dynamically and non-hierarchically to as many other nodes as possible and cooperate wit ...

system.FabFi project home
on Google Code It is an inexpensive framework for sharing wireless internet from a central provider across a town or city. It was developed originally by FabLab, Jalalabad to provide high-speed internet to parts of

Jalalabad, Afghanistan Jalalabad (; Dari/ ps, جلال‌آباد, ) is the fifth-largest city of Afghanistan. It has a population of about 356,274, and serves as the capital of Nangarhar Province in the eastern part of the country, about from the capital Kabul. Jala ...

. It is also designed for high performance across multiple hops.

Background

In January 2009, the Jalalabad FabLab wanted to bring high-speed internet to a village, hospital, university, and an

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in the city. It used this low-cost design, building on a system designed to track sheep in

Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe, the mainland territory of which comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and t ...

. The system could be easily extended to other villages and towns, and was designed to work consistently through heavy rain, smog, and trees. Community members who used the fab lab received training and experience with the system for a month, after which they were given control and maintenance of it. Many locations began to join the initial nodes, expanding the mesh over the coming months. The longest link in the system was set up early on, between the FabLab and the water tower at the public hospital in Jalalabad.

FabFi around the world

Afghanistan

Jalalabad has 45 remote FabFi

nodes In general, a node is a localized swelling (a "knot") or a point of intersection (a Vertex (graph theory), vertex). Node may refer to: In mathematics *Vertex (graph theory), a vertex in a mathematical graph *Vertex (geometry), a point where two ...

, with the longest link spanning 6 km. The total data throughput is 11.5Mbit/s. The system is extensible by anyone without getting central permission, simply by adding a node and pointing it in the right direction. The materials needed to make an endpoint link are $60US, and are available locally. An endpoint node that provides 360-degree coverage of the area near it might use more hardware and cost closer to $150US. Additional sites in Afghanistan are being considered.

Kenya

Kenya has 50 remote FabFi nodes deployed across three sites. The longest link among them is 3.5 km. The data throughput across roughly 2.5 km, with up to 6

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, exceeds 30Mbit/s. This system is designed to get

Wi-Fi Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by radio wave ...

directly to people's homes, and manages users and billing - a feature not yet rolled back into the global codebase or that used in Afghanistan.

Future sites and testbeds

As of , FabFi systems were being tested in the United States.

References