The RuralCasting project is a non-internet-based system for distributing digital resources to communities in the Philippines that have difficulty in accessing the internet. Providing Philippine schools and communities digital resources for learning and general information e.g., disaster related information, livelihood resources, health, etc. To maximize the user's smart devices, the users need only connect to the local Wi-Fi network using their Wi-Fi devices. The RuralCasting system utilized datacasting in the digital TV standard (ISDB- T) to receive over-the-air updates through digital TV broadcasts. The system developed comprises of the user-end device or the RuralCasting Box, the ISDB- T module for receiving digital TV transmissions, its own Wi-Fi LAN to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, the transmission/reception setup for testing, an offline usage measurement tool, and the landing page (RuralCasting Portal) hosting digital content from verified partners. The system tested can accommodate up to 12 users connected when connected to the Wi-Fi network. Tested to receive a 6 MB over-the-air patch using a digital TV broadcast test setup. And a successful full loop test has been done with partnered schools to determine the possible implementation framework for the RuralCasting box.

This paper analyzes the processes and challenges of technology repair in remote, low-income areas far from standard ICT repair infrastructure. Our sites of study are the fishing and farming villages of Dibut, Diotorin, and Dikapinisan in Aurora Province, Philippines, located in coastal coves against a mountain range. Residents are geographically isolated from urban areas, with the nearest peri-urban center of Baler a boat trip of several hours away, infeasible in some sea conditions. Unlike prior work in more connected rural areas, there are no local repair shops and device repair is uncommon, despite frequent breakage due to harsh conditions for electronics. The scarcity of local electronics repair limits technology access and leads to accumulation of e-waste. While prior work demonstrates that local electronics repair capability does arise in many rural areas around the world, we must also acknowledge that the successful emergence of this infrastructure depends on the intersection of many structural conditions and cannot be taken for granted. We present the material hardships of achieving local repair in terms of seams between heterogeneous urban and rural infrastructures, which illustrate the cove communities' marginality with respect to many forms of public infrastructure. However, intermittent and informal repair infrastructures based on trust relationships emerge to patch these seams in remote settings. We show how trust affects the way people dynamically construct repair infrastructure and why, based on their remoteness and the resulting value propositions of repair. Networks of trust between repairers, their clients, suppliers, fellow repairers, and certifying or training institutions crucially facilitate the movement of resources and expertise across the Philippines, but also reinforce the marginality of residents and repairers in the coves. Despite these structural challenges, local people are able to maintain a robust ecosystem for rural electrical line repair, from which we generalize the model of training grounds as a strategy for sustaining local communities of repair experts.

Repair and maintenance requirements limit the successful operation of rural infrastructure. Current best practices are centralized management, which requires travel from urban areas and is prohibitively expensive, or intensively training community members, which limits scaling. We explore an alternative model: crowdsourcing repair from the community. Leveraging a Community Cellular Network in the remote Philippines, we sent SMS to all active network subscribers (n = 63) requesting technical support. From the pool of physical respondents, we explored their ability to repair through mock failures and conducted semi-structured interviews about their experiences with repair. We learned that community members would be eager to practice repair if allowed, would network to recruit more expertise, and seemingly have the collective capacity to resolve some common failures. They are most successful when repairs map directly to their lived experiences. We suggest infrastructure design considerations that could make repairs more tractable and argue for an inclusive approach.

In the last decade, billions of people worldwide have upgraded from basic 2G feature phones to data-enabled 4G smartphones. In most cases, people upgrade in areas with 4G coverage (typically cities and large towns), but increasingly, people choose to upgrade in areas that only have 2G coverage or no cellular coverage at all. This counterintuitive behavior -- upgrading your phone despite living in an area that does not actively support many of the features of that new device -- is the focus of this work.