Expanding Connectivity to Rural Villages: A Field Story from Our WISP Journey

At Direct Media Pvt. Ltd., our mission has always been to extend reliable internet connectivity to underserved communities, even in the most challenging terrains. Recently, we worked on bringing stable internet to a mountainous rural village using our wireless backhaul network. This project highlights both the opportunities and the challenges of deploying internet service in remote areas.

Our original setup relied on a point-to-point (PtP) wireless link between our office and the village, powered by two Ubiquiti PowerBeam 5AC radios. This solution performed impressively well, delivering throughput speeds of up to 250 Mbps over a 7.5 km distance with partial line of sight. Unfortunately, last month, one of the PowerBeam units installed in the village was damaged beyond repair after a power surge caused by a local transformer failure.

To restore connectivity, we attempted to replace the damaged unit with a Ubiquiti LiteBeam, which had previously been deployed at one of our home test sites. 

The LiteBeam was preconfigured with the same SSID and security settings as our office PowerBeam before installation in the village. However, during setup, we encountered alignment and connectivity challenges. The rugged terrain, combined with fading daylight, made it difficult to align the antenna precisely to our office tower. At one point, the LiteBeam briefly detected the office PowerBeam’s SSID, but the link could not be established reliably.

Despite this, the installation revealed some key insights. The LiteBeam was able to detect several distant Ubiquiti radios, confirming that the device’s sensitivity and scanning capabilities were functioning correctly. We concluded that fine-tuning the alignment and rechecking the IP configuration would likely resolve the issue. Unfortunately, weather conditions and difficult road access during the rainy season prevented us from completing the adjustment immediately.

This field experience reinforces a few important lessons for rural deployments:

• Hardware resilience is crucial in areas with unstable power infrastructure.
• Precise alignment remains a determining factor in point-to-point wireless links, especially in mountainous terrain.
• Planning around local conditions such as weather, daylight, and accessibility is just as important as the technology itself.

We remain committed to completing this link and ensuring that the village regains stable internet access. Each challenge we face helps us refine our process and strengthen our network so that more communities can benefit from reliable connectivity.