Zahir Koradia

First impressions on the state of cellular data connectivity in India

Cellular penetration in India has grown tremendously in recent years and provides an opportunity to bridge the digital divide. However, there is little understanding of the state of cellular data connectivity in India. In this paper, we present first impressions on cellular data network performance in India. We present a measurement framework designed specifically for remote deployments and intermittent connectivity. Using this framework we evaluate three GSM based and one CDMA based cellular service providers through active measurements conducted at five rural, one semi-urban, and one urban locations. Through analysis of about 450 hours of measurement data collected over a 3-month period, we present the throughput and latency performance of cellular service providers and provide insights into the architecture of the service provider networks. Our analysis reveals aspects in cellular network design that interfere with standard protocols such as TCP, and suggests ways to improve performance.

Gurgaon idol: a singing competition over community radio and IVRS

In this paper, we describe several IVR usage and learnability insights that emerged from a singing competition held by a community radio station located in an urban community of low-income migrant workers. Our community radio station partner, Gurgaon Ki Awaaz, relies heavily on folk songs to build its content repository and develop a close rapport with its community; the station organized a competition called Gurgaon Idol, in which community members could call into an IVR system to record their songs, and vote to select the best songs. Our research yielded several insightful results on how to best solicit audio recordings on IVR, methods for crowdsourced voting on IVR, cultural preferences towards certain voting methods, how to help first-time IVR users learn the system, and practical tips to keep in mind when running such a competition. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explore usability of voice user interfaces for recording audio and for crowdsourced voting over IVR systems.

PhonePeti: exploring the role of an answering machine system in a community radio station in India

Community Radio (CR) stations are short range radio stations that serve the local media needs of their surrounding communities. Community participation by way of helping set the station agenda, airing of peoples voices, and providing them with a local communication medium, is the defining feature of CR. But this philosophy has been hard to execute in practice because of logistical difficulties, with station staff not being able to reach out to a listenership-base spread across several hundreds of square kilometers. In todays context though, the high penetration of mobile phones has made it easier for listeners to participate in the running of radio stations, but the potential of telephony and radio integration has been exploited only minimally.n In this paper, we explore the use of PhonePeti, an automated answering machine system in a community radio station based in Gurgaon, India. Answering machines are one of several ways to bring together the radio and telephony mediums. We show that this alone has the potential to considerably improve community engagement, but it also opens up many interesting issues on usability. Through quantitative and content analysis of 758 calls from 411 callers over two iterations of PhonePeti, combined with telephonic interviews of several callers, we show that significant challenges arise in being able to explain the concept of an answering machine to people who have not been exposed to a similar system in the past. We then show, through call statistics, that PhonePeti has increased community engagement by enabling more listeners to reach the station. Finally, we show that an answering machine system can be used to collect useful information from the callers.

Experiences of deploying and commercializing a community radio automation system in India

Community Radio (CR) stations are short range FM stations that seek to meet the needs of their listeners by involving them in content creation, feedback, and station management. In India, the community radio movement took off in 2008 when the first set of CR stations became operational. During that period we began design and development of the Gramin Radio Inter-Networking System (GRINS), an automation system designed to meet the ICT needs of CR stations. Over the last 2.5 years we have commercialized GRINS and deployed it at 19 CR stations in India and South Africa. In this paper, we present our experiences of software feature design, installation, training, technical support, and commercialization of GRINS in India.n We demonstrate a number of aspects: Building a small feature set at first, and then adding features on-demand ensures that utility of the software is maintained and imposition of developers assumptions is avoided. The common notion of keeping costs low for developing regions should not come at the sacrifice of stability of the solution. Standardization of deployments, even at the loss of flexibility for the customers, is important to keep the costs of technical support low. Through technical support data collected over one year, we show that physical moving parts are easy targets to introduce faults. Although identification of most faults can be done over the phone, remote Internet access is needed to resolve many faults. Finally, we highlight that selling to NGOs is hard; the best way is to club the sale as a part of a larger project for which the NGO is being funded. We believe these insights will be useful to guide others who want to commercially provide ICT solutions in developing regions.

Using ICTs to meet the operational needs of community radio stations in India

Community Radio Stations are short range FM radio stations that attempt to meet the information needs of communities situated around them. While the concept of community radio is not new, the widespread proliferation of mobile phones has generated renewed interest in using phones in conjunction with radio for closer community engagement. Radio stations in developing regions are keenly looking for solutions to do this efficiently, as well as solve several other ICT challenges including content management, fault diagnosis, and reduced cost of setup. We have designed the Gramin Radio Inter Networking System (GRINS) to address these issues. In this paper, we describe the GRINS architecture, experimental setups to evaluate audio performance on low-cost commodity hardware, and a formally expressible framework to describe and diagnose radio station configurations. Our techniques and insights can serve to help other technological interventions meant for developing regions.

Revisiting the State of Cellular Data Connectivity in India

The count of mobile Internet users in India has been growing at a rate of 27% annually and is expected to reach 300M by 2017. There is however limited understanding of whether this rapid growth is happening while also ensuring that good quality of service is provided to users. To find out, we deployed a measurement framework in 20 rural, semi-urban, and urban sites in North India and probed four leading 2G and 3G telecom providers to measure performance metrics such as availability, throughput and latency. We also observed some design and configuration aspects of cellular networks that affect the quality of service perceived by users. Our results point to many instances where misconfigurations or inadequate provisioning or poor monitoring of cellular networks led to significantly low performance provided to users. We are now using these results to argue for more robust QoS regulation in the country, and show how the current regulations for 2G and 3G services are not sufficient to hold providers accountable for the quality of service provided by them.

2G/3G network measurements in rural areas of India

Recent years have seen rapid cellular expansion in urban and rural India [1], providing an avenue to bridge the digital divide. However there is little understanding of the performance of cellular data connectivity in different geographies. We take a first step towards this. We are planning to characterize the performance of cellular data networks available across different locations, rural and urban, in India through a large scale experimental setup consisting of more than 50 measurement points across the country. We hope our findings will reveal capacity provisioning and network design characteristics that telecom operators follow in deploying 2G/3G connectivity in different areas.

A case study on the use of IVR systems by visually impaired people

Interactive Voice Response Systems (IVRS) have been used extensively to engage with poorly literate populations in the context of public health, farming, community radio, citizen journalism, and other sectors [2--7]. The voice based medium on IVRS, and the easy to use phone interface, seem to have been useful to help poorly literate and non-IT savvy populations to interact with automated computerized systems. In this study, we explore the use of IVRS for visually impaired people. To the best of our knowledge, we have not come across the use of IVR systems as an assistive technology to engage with this segment, and we describe an initial experiment we did in India. Based on our results, we feel much potential lies in researching this further because equivalent systems such as SMS and the use of screen-reading software on phones [1] are available to only trained or educated or higher income users from among visually impaired people.

RuralNet: Understanding the state of internet connectivity in rural India

Connecting the the rural regions of the world to the Internet has been a topic of significant research, where focus has been on building access technologies. At the same time, there has been an exponential increase in mobile penetration in developing countries like India. In addition to 2G data technologies like GPRS and 1xRTT, cellular service providers have begun deploying higher data rate technologies like HSPA and 1xEV-DO in smaller towns. The effort to build access technologies for rural regions has been under the assumption that the rural regions are largely disconnected from the Internet. However, little work has been done to study the state of Internet connectivity in rural regions, particularly the cellular data technologies that have seen dramatic increase in penetration and usage. In this work we attempt to understand the availability and performance of cellular Internet connectivity in rural India.