I'm honored to moderate this session. I've been asked to because we do,

I have a passion for decentralized networks as we do mobile mesh networks. So I feel really honored and I look a bit not like a startup person right now because I already had a three hours workshop at the HR festival. I'm also a dance artist. So that was about tango lifestyle

meeting corporate culture. That's the outfit. So I hope you like it. So we have three winners here. There are awarded projects by the Mozilla Foundation.

The panel is Access All Areas, Independent Infrastructure, Brazil, India, and South Africa. So very international here. So can I have on stage, Jaspreet, Jaspreet Singh. I think we all go on stage or we go one after all?

Okay, we do one after. So then I say something about, they are the main winners. They are the main winners. The project is called Grand Mark, right? And they are the way winners of the Mozilla Equal Rating Challenge,

which is a challenge by the Mozilla Foundation in order to foster an open internet. They are interested or they see the internet as a global public resource and therefore they created this challenge. They have three principles.

Those are free discrimination, free of discrimination, free of gatekeepers, and free of pay to play. So, Jaspreet, you are the Senior Project Engineer of the Department of Electrical Engineering

of the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai. I had to write this down, as you can see. So I hand over to you. We're gonna have three minutes presentations of each project and then we're gonna discuss a little bit of the challenges.

And the last thing is we're gonna have a Q&A session. So, Jaspreet. Thank you, Ian. So, interaction part is done. Let me get back to my presentation. So we call this solution as the Grand Mark Solution. Let me just explain, just spend 10 seconds. So, gram, it's a Hindi word, gram.

So Indian, you can say. So gram means way, so villages. And mark is a way. So we find a way to the villages, that is to the rulers. So I think what we focus here is the connectivity. What about the people who are unconnected ones?

So we just find the solution through this Mozilla Open Innovation Challenge, which has given us a platform to showcase globally. So and we have won, and thank you for that. Okay. So, the current situation in India is just like, you can see four billion people unconnected globally, even.

Okay, so 800 million, that's 6,40,000 villages. We have 6,40,000 villages in India. And we're unconnected. I mean, there is no connectivity. So forget about the mobile connections, 2G even. So they are totally unconnected, means they are totally black.

So by this, so we have many challenges. So there is no backhaul. Backhaul is the fiber point of presence that is the point where the internet connection is actually terminated. So like you are getting signals on your mobile, so nearby there is a cell station where it emits,

and you are able to receive. So in the villages, there are no backhaul. So this is the first of the main challenges. Second, so why these villages are unconnected? Because it's low, no private operators are going because low ARP, ARP is what? Average revenue per user.

That means private operators don't want to go into the villages because they feel like no income is coming back. So they just don't want to go. So next, difficult terrain. So in India, it's mix of terrain, different terrain somewhat is hilly, less hilly, we call them as guards.

Someone sees reverse, so it's a mix. So you know, we have to plan geographically, and you know, planning itself in different is very difficult. So we came as a solution. So what is the solution? So it's a TV white space. You know, white space is called as free junk in the television spectrum.

So we have different spectrum, you know. Okay, it's like 100 megahertz, 200 megahertz, the frequency we call. So there is the frequency which came around 480 to 580 megahertz is the television frequency which currently rests with the national broadcaster Doordarshan, but that is totally unused.

So in different parts of the countries, small junks like eight megahertz are there, but in India, a complete band of like 90 megahertz is lying free and nobody's using them. So what we are proposing to the government, hey, why don't you use it? Where are you putting? Because you know, spectrum is very scarce. So it's like if today at this moment you're not using the spectrum, it's totally waste.

Like coal, we are burning, it's gone. Like spectrum, we are not using it, it's gone. Okay, so we came up with the unique solution. Why we call this unique solution? Because it's a one-box solution. Where the fiber terminate ends, we give them a box that you can take the internet connection

from the fiber point of presence to the unconnected one using these different locations like back hull is again using the TV wide space. So we have developed low powered, low cost solution chips that can be utilized to take the internet from the fiber point of presence to the different one. So it has unique property like smaller is the frequency,

greater penetration, you can go along far better like 10 to 20 kilometers, you have gone. So and third one is the coverage area. So you can cover more, I mean like, so because they're in different, different tavern and the village is too far, so you can cover different and long villages which are very unconnected

with the help of this solution. So this can be turned into the back hull which means fiber point of presence to the unconnected one and then same box can be used for 2.4 gigahertz and all are connected through cloud. Cloud is like you can control it anywhere. So next, so it's like scalability.

So low cost, low mobility, that means the pedestrian. We call them as fixed broadband. Users are fixed, like you're sitting here, you're getting internet, so don't need to move because people in the villages, they just stay, they go in the work day, night,

so in the night time they can utilize. So the main thing is we are focusing, it's fixed. So what we call this as frugal 5G. So scalability is very easy. Off the shelf hardware, by the off shelf hardware, use the open source RF card, so whatever we have developed,

so we have put it like open source, anybody can use this RF converters and provide the end-to-end digital solutions to the ruler and the unconnected communities. So that's what we say, that we have end-to-end digital solutions for connected, the ruler, or the unconnected, or the underserved communities.

What is the need of that nation? We have unconnected peoples, we have technology development at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, we have network planning tools that tell you, okay, this, this village should be connected to this fiber point of presence and all. So we have technology tested at different, different test beds, properly tested,

yes, working fine, and then we have social economic changes. That means if you can just do this, so people will, people, we are going to create the village level, entrepreneur, that means it's, the model is very sustainable. If you go around, people will use it and the revenue will be definitely generated, but with what?

With low cost solution, with low power. So this is the only thing. Less CAPEX is there, more revenue is there. So that's why we call this, this solution is very feasible. So thank you. Thank you, Jasper. So, we have the second winner

of the equal, Mozilla equal rating challenge, that is Tim. Tim from Project Isizwe. Tim has a background in digital media and advertising, and he's, he joined Isizwe as head of content, and figuring out that content is a good business,

he opened a new business that is called Topetza, correct? So here you have it. Cool, thanks. Here we go. Yeah.

Cool, I'll get started. Hi everyone, good to be here. So I'm from Project Isizwe, which is an organization, a non-profit, that delivers free public wifi in public spaces in South Africa, predominantly in low income communities.

We started in 2013, and the main thing that we did that was our primary kind of drive of success is that we convinced the city of Twane, which is the capital city of South Africa, and one of its biggest metros, that the internet should be a municipal service, like water and electricity,

everyone should get a basic daily quota of wifi. So we started out at risk, did five sites, and the city said if you hit certain targets, then we'll talk about a bigger project. We smashed those targets out, and they could see that there's a massive demand for this public wifi.

Since then, it's been a snowball effect, and we've delivered over a thousand free internet zones, as we call them, which are maybe the size of these two rooms would be one free internet zone. So we got a thousand across the city of Twane, connecting over a hundred thousand users a day, and since inception, we've connected three million unique devices to the internet.

And just to give you some context, there are only about three million people in Twane, but obviously a few people have multiple devices. But we've made a huge impact in Twane, and people are using it daily all the time to keep connected. How we managed to make it affordable

and at a fraction of the cost that a regular sort of private supplier would be able to provide is we use municipal infrastructure, so we use city power, we use city high sites, city venues for the actual antennas, and it just clears a lot of the red tape about digging trenches and getting commissions,

and just makes it a lot faster and a lot easier and a lot cheaper. We also use local suppliers, so we don't have a centralized techy team who goes around the country or around the city. We use local guys who are already going out to richer people who are getting WiFi put in their house, but we just pay them to go into the informal settlements

where they normally wouldn't go to do the basic maintenance and servicing of the hardware. We've also struck deals with major fiber suppliers. There's a huge amount of fiber in South Africa under the ground, but these suppliers don't have any incentive to bring it out of the ground

and go the last mile for these informal settlements because no one's gonna pay for it unless you strike a deal with a city like we have. So we're giving them a discounted price, but it's better than getting nothing for this fiber that's just continuously flowing underneath the ground. And then we've also got deals with providers like RACIS hardware as part of their CSI.

One of the other main things that we do, which has been part of our success, is that we offer significant data, 500 megabytes per day per device, and the main driver behind this is that in South Africa, mobile data, especially on prepaid plans,

is hugely expensive. 87% of SA users aren't prepaid data plans, and depending on how much you buy at one time, 500 meg will cost you plus minus $10, which is a daily wage if you're lucky enough to have employment. So you can imagine that having that 500 megabytes per day

is really putting money back in people's pocket. And the problem that these mobile data users have had is that it almost becomes a self-enforced walled garden in that you only access the internet for the very basics of what you need to do. So WhatsApp, Facebook, check email if you have email,

which a lot of our users didn't initially, and just you have a very sort of rudimentary understanding of what the internet is. But once you give people 500 megabytes a day and they don't have that fear of data consumption and fear of just losing money, then they're able to research their degrees, research their school projects,

look for jobs, make digital CVs, and these are just some feedbacks. Like the English isn't great because they're verbitim, but you can see that people are using it for things that are greater than what they can, just use 10 megs or 50 megs or 20 megs that they would normally buy.

Video is a huge driver on our network because obviously people on their own mobile devices can't get video. So obviously they watch a lot of entertainment content and as this guy says, he gets the socket, but there's a lot of learning material that we push over our content portal and things to sort of open up the internet and say there's a lot more out there

than just the basics that you know of. So that's where we've been, but the next chapter is to take a national and hopefully continent-wide. But our main issue is because we are quite reliant on government funding, we subject to obviously

what happens in government. So for example, last year there was a change in government at the local level. So it's a whole new system, a whole new contracting process, all of that. So we just can't move fast enough relying on government contracts. So App3Fi is the next chapter of Project Deceasware. We're consolidating other public free Wi-Fi networks

across the country under one banner. Obviously the more users you can get online, and the wider the spread, the more valuable it will be to sponsors. And instead of users just getting 500 megs a day like currently, they're gonna have to earn their Wi-Fi. So they might have to watch a video, download an ebook, play a game, download an app.

They'll have to undertake some action in order to unlock that next level of data. And that's where we'll approach the sponsors, that instead of that video that they create, costing people data, it's actually gonna give them data. So it's flipping the model and allowing brands to get involved and be part of the story

of providing people with free Wi-Fi. Obviously another important part of this is gonna be data collection, but we're very cognizant of the fact that we're not gonna take or pass on any personal information. It's all gonna be anonymized and aggregated, but it is gonna be important for sponsors. With this, though, we can also serve

a lot more personalized and relevant content as well as advertising and unlocks the opportunity to get private sector sponsorship. One example is that we've got a deal with one of the major banks to deliver their job readiness program over the Wi-Fi. I can see I'm taking up your time.

So yeah, that's where we're going. Thanks, everyone. Thanks a lot, Tim. And we have the third winner from Brazil, Adriano. He's a journalist by background. We're involved in a lot of free technology and independent media projects.

And you are presenting the project, Co-op Lab. So, hello, everyone. I'm glad to be here. First of all, I'd like to thanks to Mozilla and all the Gig team for inviting me to be here and share a little bit about a project

that we have started in Brazil. It's called Co-Lab. And it's a network based on cooperative principles and dedicated to reduce the digital divide in Brazil. So just to give you some numbers, about 40% of Brazilian population

have no access to the internet. And although Co-Lab has only few months, we aggregates a bunch of people who have been working deeply in the last years with different aspects related to mesh networks, related to community and internet service providers,

community radios and so on. But the main difference from Co-Lab to our previous experience is that now we are addressing the connectivity issue in scale. So instead of raise funds and donation the equipments for each community,

we, as we use it to do, now we will make a loan and all our investment will be recovered in one year at most. So with this money back, we will keep connecting new communities and we are also thinking in a kind of missile or association fee

for the groups in order to support our network. And this week we are finishing an open call to communities interested in implementing infrastructure for digital communications. We are interested mainly in low-income and rural areas

in place where you won't find any other alternative for digital communication, right? So basically we are going to fund communities in three different kinds of fields of service.

The first one is simply to connect the communities to the internet. So we can use it to use mesh networks, but actually we can do it with any kind of network topology. And the second one,

the second one consists in local service that can work without internet, local service that only works in a certain place, in a certain community. And finally we intend to support grassroots communitary GSM stations.

So with this kind of mobile service providers owned by the community, they can make almost free calls inside the network and very cheap calls for abroad using voiceover IP. So we can also use text messages for free in this area.

And so we are proposing not only developing independent infrastructures for the internet, but also infrastructures for digital communications that are independent from the internet.

So we are trying to develop infrastructures that can work not entirely or at least without a big dependence of the internet. So it seems to me an important point

because now we know how compromised is the infrastructure of the internet. If you think about surveillance, if you think about privacy, or if you are talking about data autonomy. So basically after this election we will land equipments and train communities

in all different aspects related to the operation of such infrastructure. And it includes not only technical aspects, but also legal, logistical, and financial topics about operating a system like this.

And actually it's an important point. We don't install the service. We only teach the community how and train them to operate this kind of service. And of course we support them along the way into the community feels ready to operate by themselves.

So I don't know if I have more time. I will keep talking because he's not paying attention to me. So just one more point. Another possibility is that the organization responsible for the service management,

local service management, can also implement small charts to the users to cover the operation costs. And it could be done through voucher systems. The users buy voucher, they can call, they can use the internet or use a local service.

And it will help the community, the service, to maintain, to provide the sustainability, some kind of sustainability for the system. So basically that's it. We are very excited to select the villages,

the groups that we work, and we are planning to next month start to implement this kind of infrastructure there. And that's it. Thank you, Abboudiano.

So let's take all three winners here on the stage. So I would say very powerful projects we have in here. We would like just to have a little bit of a discussion because I mean, what comes to my mind is there are probably big players on the corporate side

that are not so much in favor. So what is your experience? And other big players like the government, how is the government dealing with you? So what was your experience in that? Who wants to start? Yeah, thank you for the question.

Yeah, so that's correct. So why we have solution, we have everything, but still it is not implemented because yes, government is playing here the major role. The, as I said earlier, the television spectrum dressed with the national broadcaster, Doordarshan, and government is not, it's a licensed one.

It's not unlicensed. Anybody, I can't use it. So what we have done, we have taken an experimental license for one year and tried all the experiments. But yes, and it is related again with the corporate sides. Yes, you know everybody. So it's engaged like a big, big telecom market.

So recently, Jio, Reliance Jio, that is Mukesh Ambani is one of the richest person of India. He launches 4G services in India and due to which, I mean like it's like, so yes, government here is playing the major role. It's not de-licensing this man because of the influence of the big telecom market, but we are really trying hard

by using the open innovation challenge so that we can tell globally, look, this is a better solution and we can use it to provide the connectivity to the rural ones. Thank you. Yeah, from our side, I think when we started, we were a small non-profit and the mobile operators just didn't really care, to be honest,

because it was just a negligible amount of people. But as it's got bigger, they have started taking notice. But I think our kind of, what we say to them is that actually we're helping them because people are going to these public spaces and getting the free wifi, but they're starting to understand what the power of the internet is.

As I said earlier, that they're starting to watch videos, that they're starting to delve deeper into these things that they don't wanna go home and not have access to it. So it is actually getting people to sort of understand the internet and as they go up in life and as they have a bit more money, they will start using that mobile network. Because we have fixed place,

we're not really eating into, day-to-day we are, but not enough. In fact, we'll probably help them in the long term. About the big company, big players, the kind of community or village that we are planning to work

is not exactly the kind of community that the big mobile service providers or big companies, they want profit enough in this place, in this kind of village. So they want to operate there. There's no other alternatives. So it's not, until now,

it's not really a big problem for us. But we are also planning to make, create some partnership with local business and local governments and local companies also.

So, I see we have one more minute. So I think you have a lot of questions and they are all valid. And we should continue the talk at the global innovation gathering at the makerspace in there. So I think you have a lot of questions that you can ask the panelists.

Yeah, but the next panel is gonna start. So ask them. We have one more minute or we are through. Ha ha ha ha. So, yeah. It's a very simple question. The question is how do you,

what are the criteria for the people to apply? Who will you give access to and priority because what you give is so nice. You're talking about millions, tens of millions of people. How much can you really afford to offer the service and what would be the criteria for selecting the first one to be able to do so? So let me please just say the question in the microphone.

Otherwise it wouldn't be on the recording. Question was what's the criteria to select who participates because the demand is so big? Thank you. Okay, so. So selecting, the selection based is on the,

in my case, I mean like, so first we need to get the point of presence where there is a point of presence so we can see the two extendability, okay. This is the internet availability. So these are the far more areas which are connected. So we need to, the selection is based purely in my case

in that scenario where is the actual point of presence and so we select and second geographically to set up the test bed. I think this is the selection. For us, I mean, although we're moving to a more sustainable model, we still aim to work with municipalities. So historically we've worked with the municipality

to identify areas where the most need was and go from there. I mean, in Twania there is a project. The idea is that we take, as we are treating it like a municipal service, just like people need to walk maybe one kilometer to a bus stop, we want to bring a free internet zone

within one kilometer of every person in the city. So that's the idea for that city and that's what we want to roll out, that it will cover everybody, but not into everyone's home, but you should be able to go there for your daily quota. Yeah. We have to stop. I'm getting like angry looks here.

Thanks a lot.