How Relaynet restores communication in times of Internet Shutdowns
Source: https://www.accessnow.org/cms/assets/uploads/2020/02/KeepItOn-2019-report-1.pdf
Do you know the feeling when your internet connection is not working properly, either because it’s slow or when that application takes too long to respond? Bummer, right? 🙄
Well, now imagine an internet blackout in your whole city, or country for days, weeks or even months. Suddenly, waiting a few minutes to get internet connection doesn't sound so bad anymore. 🤯
Unfortunately this is a reality for too many countries. Internet blackouts are usually caused by natural disasters, wars, terrorist attacks and increasingly by repressive regimes that use the blackouts in politically sensitive times such as elections, protests and conflicts.
Here are some facts: according to KeepItOn, there were 213 documented shutdowns in 2019. In that same year India tops the list globally with 121 incidents. Following India, Venezuela, was a global “leader” for shutdowns, blocking access to social media platforms at least 12 times in 2019. After Venezuela, Yemen, Iraq, Algeria and Ethiopia were the countries with the most shutdowns. Even the British Transport Police shut down the wi-fi on London's Tube network during a protest by climate change activists Extinction Rebellion.
This has a massive impact on people's daily lives. Just think of students trying to submit forms for scholarships or being denied access to educational material, people deprived of news or contacting loved ones. All the online businesses that have no physical shops and therefore have no means of making business, doctors and patients with no access to updated information on Covid-19 and other diseases, NGOs being unable to reach out to people in distress. The list can go on…
Relaynet was developed for such blackout scenarios. Relaynet is a computer network designed to resist internet blackouts caused by the aforementioned contexts. Basically put, any Internet-based service that doesn’t require real-time communication can use Relaynet. This project was envisioned by Gustavo Narea at the University of Oxford who later founded Relaycorp to support the Relaynet project and at the same time keep it open and inclusive.
But how does it work exactly? Well imagine a postman. You give them your letters. They deliver them. You wait for them to bring the letters back. In this network the postman is called a courier.
If you have internet access Relaynet will use the best available network and will save your data when no network is available. The courier, who is a real person, will then physically transport your data to a computer that is connected to the internet.
We at Bloco have been developing, together with Relaycorp, the network’s beta version for the past months. This has been a challenging thus stimulating project and a unique opportunity to develop a product that can have such an important impact on so many people's lives.
This is the first of a series of articles where we’ll tell you more about this amazing project.