Working together to scale up in Uganda

The NREN has been performing this task since it was established in 2006 by the universities and major research institutes. "What they wanted above all was connectivity," says Nicholas Mbonimpa, CEO of RENU. "And that connectivity had to be both affordable and reliable."

This success did not come right away. "We introduced eduroam in 2015. Very few institutions took it up. But then came covid-19. The government closed all educational institutions and that lasted for almost two years. Some universities started teaching online; they asked for help from us, especially to offer their students affordable connectivity off-campus."

Hotspots

RENU came up with two solutions. The first was Zero-rated Mobile Access. "We asked telecom operators to connect for free to Ugandan websites that students needed. For some institutions this proved a solution."

But the real success came with Metro eduroam. "In this, we approached service providers in the capital Kampala that had Wi-Fi infrastructure: were they willing to open up their network to students? If so, those students authenticate with eduroam and then their traffic is routed to the RENU network."

The companies offered more than three hundred hotspots. And the number of educational institutions with eduroam exploded from five to more than two hundred. "Our members have really become aware of the importance of this service, also after covid-19. Last year, we had more than 45,000 students using Metro eduroam. We have an app for students to find the hotspots. And then they can go online for free."

Pocket routers

Metro eduroam worked well for students. But the staff, lecturers and researchers needed a different solution, especially during the many field surveys. ‘For them, we came up with eduroam on the Go. Essentially, that’s a pocket-sized Wi-Fi router. It connects to Uganda's nationwide 4G/5G network, using a special SIM card that connects only to the RENU network, and broadcasts Wi-Fi with authentication through eduroam.’

"This solution is very secure and convenient for users. The institution pays RENU for the cost. We have handed out more than five hundred devices so far, and it is one of our fastest growing products."

Made in Uganda

Meanwhile, despite – or rather because of – the success of Metro eduroam, RENU is not yet satisfied with this service. "As the uptake of Metro eduroam grows, the costs of delivering and maintaining the service are rising by the day. At the same time, reliability is insufficient. Sometimes that’s because of technical problems at the hotspot; at other times it’s due to network issues, especially since in deploying through other providers’ infrastructure we lack full visibility. Lastly, electricity is not always available everywhere in Uganda."

"So we started thinking. How can we scale up this network in a way that we can guarantee reliability and availability?"

"That's how we came to routers with solar cells, which connect to our own network. So we can also manage them ourselves. The technology comes from an American company, but we assemble the routers and soon we will build them completely ourselves. Made in Uganda!"

RENU has big ambitions. "In five years, we want to have some ten thousand hotspots outside the campuses. But we have to be able to finance that. For this year we have already deployed two hundred solar-powered routers off-campus, with financial support from the Internet Society Foundation."

Campus Network-as-a-Service 

RENU has been providing training and support for the institutions' ICT staff since 2014. "We train them in the basics of network management, cybersecurity and you name it. Occasionally, however, that’s not enough. Then we go to the institution, help them redesign the network and sometimes we even donate equipment. In all that, we received a lot of help ourselves from the Network Setup Resource Center (NSRC) at the University of Oregon."

Recently, RENU went a step further. "We noticed that a lot of things are still wrong at institutions. Sometimes the people we trained leave. Or improvement is not budgeted for. There are numerous reasons that keep the quality of the network below par."

That is why RENU came up with a new offer this year: Campus Network-as-a-Service (CNaaS). "It means we manage the campus network ourselves. Sort of like SURF offers Wifi-as-a-Service."

Initial reactions are often somewhat anxious: ‘Institutions worry that their ICT departments will become irrelevant. But they still have plenty of work left. We’ve already started managing a few campus networks and those institutions are very satisfied with the results.’

Many partners in the NREN world

In this service too, RENU is working with a foreign partner, namely Norway's NREN Sikt. And the Ugandans have many more partners in the NREN world. For example the UbuntuNet Alliance, an African counterpart of Géant. And KENET, the sister organisation in neighbouring Kenya. "It's a good community, where you can learn a lot from each other."