Zyxt: A network planning tool for rural wireless ISPs

Rural areas are home to 45% of the world’s population and are neglected in the design and deployment of broadband Internet access. Beyond establishing connectivity, the planning and design of networks in these areas is often challenging because the complexity of planning such networks often exceeds the knowledge and practical expertise of individuals - even individuals that are experts in this field. Yet, proper planning and efficient network designs are critical to the long term viability and scalability of such networks. In this paper, we highlight the challenges that lone operators who lack sufficient technical support and tools must face when designing and deploying their networks. We then present a network planning tool, Zyxt, that aims to help individuals in planning rural wireless networks. We describe the design and implementation of our prototype and evaluate it against synthetic and real-world planning problems. Our evaluation demonstrates that Zyxt is able to solve real-world network planning problems using relatively modest computing resources within a few hours.