Mumbai based White Space provider, one of the shortlists for Mozilla prize

NEW DELHI: Mumbai based Gram Marg Solution project, which has developed an open source, low-cost prototype to provide affordable broadband access to the Internet in rural communities utilizing television White Space Spectrum has been selected as one of the five semi-finalists of the Mozilla 'Equal Rating Innovation Challenge'.

Mozilla, the non-profit organisation behind the open source browser Firefox, launched the award in October 2016 to support innovation for providing open Internet access to communities living without it. Mozilla offers an award of $250,000 in funding and expert mentorship to bring these solutions to the market.

Other projects in the shortlist include include Freemium Mobile Internet (FMI) of Canada, Afri-Fi: Free Public Wi-Fi of South Africa, Free Networks P2P Cooperative of Brazil and Zenzeleni ‘Do it for yourselves’ Networks (ZN) of South Africa.

Katharina Borchert, Chief Innovation Officer at Mozilla, said in a blog post: “While we did have almost a hundred teams submit solutions, we also had thousands of people meeting and engaging in this content through our events, webinars, and website. With this in mind, Mozilla aims to further engage with more teams who sent us their concepts, connect them to our network, and continue to grow the community of people working on this important topic.”

The challenge received a total of 98 submissions from 27 countries. The final shortlist was prepared after benchmarking submissions against criteria of compliance with Equal Rating, affordability and accessibility, empathy, technical feasibility, as well as scalability, user experience, differentiation, potential for quick deployment, and team potential.