Pomeys (FR), May 2007 - One of the main obstacles to ICT deployment in European rural areas is the lack of cheap high-bandwidth Internet access when ADSL is not available. Alternative solutions exist, but they are expensive and reserved for professional uses (e.g. satellite access). Furthermore, the strategies for introducing ADSL in rural areas of the EU differ from country to country, and while some are already widely covered or plan to be, others will never implement ADSL everywhere because of specific geographical conditions.
Some communities are not willing to wait for national strategies to solve the problems and have begun to work on solutions locally. An informal community in France called the RAN Group is one of these and has become its own Internet services provider.
RAN is the acronym for "Rural Area Network" (in comparison to LAN or WAN, local/wide area network). It is an informal community of people interested in wireless network connections (wifi) and related topics. Their battle horse is to invite inhabitants of rural areas to set up their own network access, becoming their own Internet services providers.
To achieve the task, the Group's members help others to set up wifi transmitters in different places (mainly in the countryside), so that the network can grow from one point to the next. Thus, they can share a single ADSL-covered connection among several members living in the "shadow areas". They claim that this solution can provide a good Internet connection at low cost, on the condition that people maintain the antennas and avoid bandwidth-heavy practices like peer-to-peer applications.
Beyond the technical aspects, this solution brings some interesting side effects. The RAN Group notes that its members became more involved in the social life of their areas. The network requires regular meetings to plan periodic maintenance operations. The decision to establish their own Internet service has required the RAN Group to contact municipalities, negotiate with local farmers to plant antennas in fields, calculate costs with potential new members, share technical information among the different RAN members of several regions, etc. In this way, the network generates social links instead of isolating people.
A French blog about the rural uses of the Internet has been launched by FING (The Next Generation Internet Foundation), GRETA du Velay, CREATIF network, and DIACT (former DATAR, interministerial delegation for the development of territories' competitivity). It can be accessed at rural.fing.org
.
