Refugee Crisis – Lesbos – 2015
The escalation of the refugee crisis in August 2015 resulted in the arrival of thousands of refugees daily on the Greek island of Lesvos. DTL initially deployed a small team with the task of building a number of WiFi zones for refugees to use. Shortly after arrival they were approached by the UNHCR with the request to provide a WiFi service in the first two refugee camps to be built in Greece. The services were both for the refugees as well as for the NGO’s working in the camps and the local authorities.
This has since extended to 18 camps across the whole of Greece. The work quite often literally meant starting from scratch as most camp locations were greenfield sites with no infrastructure.
On many occasions DTL also had to build long distance point-2-point links to bring internet access on-site. Especially in the early stages, while building the required infrastructure, DTL relied satellite services both for backhaul (using Globalstar SatFi units) and for team communications (using satellite phones). They also used SPOT satellite trackers to geolocate the teams in real time. In the 15 months since they first deployed to Greece more than 450,000 refugees have passed through the camps that in which they provided WiFi services.
Two DTL volunteers taking a rare break. Kara Tepe refugee camp
Credits: Disaster Tech Lab
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Original published at: http://spacewatchme.com/2016/12/day-05/
