Overview
SohoStar Rwanda, Ltd is a wholly owned subsidiary of the SohoStar Corporation of Colorado. SohoStar Rwanda was registered in December of 2008 to develop a network design proposal for the Government of Rwanda to implement a national communication network.
SohoStar has been developing a global information network providing communications services with very specific intellectual property, owned exclusively by Advanced Intelligent Networks and licensed to the SohoStar Corporation.
On behalf of SohoStar Rwanda, David Roland lived in Kigali, Rwanda analyzing terrain, social factors, current state of Rwanda technology, infrastructure, and political influences. Through a government liaison Iyako Augustine, Roland had access to numerous government agencies and politicians. Early in 2009, Roland examined a DVB-T technical solution from Israel to determine the feasibility of applying it to Rwanda.
At the time, SohoStar established a WiFi network in Kigali providing triple-play (Voice, Video, and Data) services relayed by satellite from Alexandria, Virginia, and back through the Internet to servers in Denver, Colorado. Roland successfully demonstrated to Rwanda Government officials, VoIp phone calls from Denver to Kigali in parallel to traditional Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) International calls. SohoStar’s Voice Quality, fewer drop outs, and low lag times exceeded the performance of traditional phone services.
Roland provided a proposal in competition with other providers from Israel, the US and South Korea, and had an initial commitment from Rwanda’s Social Security administration, to implement the design. Due to unknown factors, the offer was rescinded and development contract was awarded to Korean Telecom.
The design prepared for the Government of Rwanda was to implement a high-speed national communication network and connect to the Internet. The backbone was built from satellite downlinks and initially terrestrial radio modems configured as a mesh network of nodes. Each node had redundant controls providing content distribution and network coordination to traffic (edge) concentrators. Each concentrator covered an area of 300M square meters, overlapped in a hexagon grid. Each concentrator could provide 4,000 voice calls in an urban deployment using Akanyana phones, supporting a population density of 2,000 people per sqkm. All equipment was engineered for solar power and the radio modems were not line of sight.
Despite Rwanda choosing a different vendor, Roland continued engineering development to develop solutions for rural America with minimal infrastructure and usage costs.
The Akanyana phones were developed specifically by SohoStar with an end user cost of $25USD and no usage costs for voice and text carried over the Rwandan national network. Infrastructure cost for the 45 primary nodes was approximately $1000USD each, and licensing from RURA was $8,000 per year for the entire project. SohoStar RW still has assets in Rwanda.