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The Internet by Motorbike
MrHatken writes "An interesting combination of wireless, wheels, and store-and-forward email: 'In Cambodia, motorbikes act as routers for a store-and-forward email system: The New York Times reports on a system that allow remote villages in Cambodia to send and receive email via Wi-Fi-equipped motorbikes. The Motoman system converges in the provincial capital where a satellite-enabled school uploads and downloads email for the remote recipients. The system is funded in part through U.S. benefactors who aren't just sending money; they're spending time there as well, and helping to improve the quality of medicine and people's livelihoods.'"
wi-fi has been a standard features on harley-linksys-davidsons for several years now.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
WTF? Someone just woke up one day and said, "Know what bob? I'm a gonna go to Cambodia. That's right. Cambodia."
"What are you gonna do in Cambodia?"
"I don't know. But I think I'm gonna ride a motorbike."
"A motorbike?"
nods.
"In Cambodia?"
"Right."
"wow. Why?"
"I think I'll use it to send email. You know, there's a lack of email in Cambodia. And there are lots of motorbikes. If we could just get a motorbike to help us send email, the people of Cambodia would be able to get Nigerian spam just like we do."
"You know, now that you've put it that way, it sounds like a good idea. Motorbike, email, Cambodia, spam. Can I go with?"
"Well of course, Bob. I wouldn't have it any other way."
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
do they have redundancy plan in case those motorbikes are stolen or damaged in accidents?
It sounds extremely familiar....
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
so we can say that the ability of sending and receiving email became one of the things which essentially needed for human life just like proper medicine for example... or at least the benefactors think so...
Aure entuluva!
No, really -- talk about the Pony Express.
Lets just hope they don't get spam-flooded like the rest of us (unless they're delivering "food"). It'd be a real downer to wait for the iBike to arrive, just to be told how to enlarge your penis...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
just hope this is a temporary solution rather than their long-term plan.
otherwise, they can go as far as providing high speed internet connection at $9.95 per month on a 500cc bike and a low speed plan at $2.95 per month on a 50cc bike. and very soon they'll propose to build better road, maybe highway so that information can be moved around more quickly.
________________________________________
MODEL FOR THE WORLD: DIGITAL DIVIDE CLOSED IN CAMBODIAN VILLAGES WHERE E-MAIL IS DELIVERED by WI-FI on a MOTORBIKE
Thirteen remote, medically deprived and impoverished Cambodian villages are being transformed into healthier, more prosperous and knowledgeable societies thanks to a mobile e-mail and limited Internet linked system which its innovators say "has closed the digital divide."
The villages in Ratanakiri, bordering Vietnam and Laos and populated by ethnic minorities have no postal system, nor access to phones, radio, TV or newspapers. Per capita income average $37 a year and they is no electricity nor piped water. But since September 1 they have had access to the Internet through an e-mail pick up and delivery service that has introduced telemedicine, e-commerce and participatory democracy to people who have had no contact with the world and even their own country up to now.
Each village had a school built in the past year through contributions from private donors (www.cambodiaschools.com ) with matching funds from the World and Asian Development Banks. Each school has solar panels that provide sufficient energy to run a donated computer some six hours a day. A computer/English teacher, trained at the Future Light Orphanage in the capital of Phnom Penh, instructs the village children in these skills which enables them to send e-mail to other children on the network in the province, or to anywhere in the world, including the school donors and their children in the U.S, U.K. and Japan.
The young teacher also acts as the village postman by reporting sick persons to the Provincial Referral Hospital by e-mail with digital photo attachments of digital photos showing a patient's symptoms, ailments or wounds. Such information can also be sent to specialists at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical school who have joined the project to provide diagnoses and medical guidance.
One of the most dramatic benefits of the "Internet Village Motoman" project as it is coined, is its introduction of participatory democracy. Villagers for the first time are able to connect directly with the governor by sending him e-mail with grievances and requests. The governor who is a strong supporter of this project has linked his office with a mobile delivery receiving unit (Mobile Access Point) so he can receive messages from the villages and respond to them.
The system uses five donated Honda motorcycles, equipped with a small box on the back seat that receives and transmits stored e-mail through the wireless (wi-fi) system. The Hondas delivering and receiving its mail on five routes, five days a week, begin their route early in the morning by stopping at the satellite dish (hub) located at the Ezra Vogel Special Skills schools that is joined to provincial referal hospital in Banlung. As the Hondas move from village to village they pass the schools which have a similar box and antenna, where e-mail has been stored. When the motorbike passed the school the data moves wirelessly in three seconds two-ways and the school has received and sent its stored mail.
Most of the equipment for this pilot project (which is about to be expanded to two more regions of Cambodia, Preah Vihear and Siem Reap), has been donated: the satellite dish and Internet link by Thai-Com/Shin Satellite; motorcycles by Honda; solar panels and digital cameras by Sanyo, and startup costs with a grant of $18,000 by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation of Japan. But it can now be replicated in Cambodia relatively economically. The cost of a satellite dish through the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, along with a license to operate it, is $2,500 and a 24-hour 256 Kb/s Thai -Com Satellite uplink is $285 a month. Some 15-20 schools could be linked to such a hub
The system can be made sustainable by providing the motormen (or vehicle drivers) side income in delivering or picking up equipment and passengers on
Why stop at WiFi, I'm sure they could use PDAs (simputers) and even iPods (Hell I know I could). Maybe they'll be the first with real WiFi iPods? email generally needs a terminal at both ends.
--
"we live in a post-ideological world..." - Billy Bragg.
"Well of Cambodia?"
"I go withat's right. Cambodia would bob? I'm a gonna go to Cambodia, spam just woke use it to send email, there's a lack of could just know. But are you gonna do withat's right. Cambodia. Able torbikes. If we could be able of Cambodia. That's a lack of email i go with?"
"You gonna do it think I'm gonna good idea. Motorbike."
"A motorbikes. If course, Bob. If we could just get a motorbike a good idea. Motorbikes. In Cambodia. An spam just to send email, Cambodia, spambodia, spam. Cambodia, spam just like a good email. You know, to Cambodia. That's like a good be able are lots of motorbike."
"A motorbike, email, Cambodia would be and to Cambob?"
so we can say that the ability of sending and receiving email became one of the things which essentially needed for human life just like proper medicine for example... or at least the benefactors think so...
;-)
Two years or so ago I visited Tami Nadu, a poor state in the south of India... Even in the smallest towns (say, 20 inhabitants which is nothing in India), you would find a place offering dirst-cheap internet acces (typically 2 or 3 computers sharing a 33.6k line). People there had taken to using that instead of phone because it was much, much cheaper! It allowed for exemple parents who had a son or daughter studying or working in an other city to contact him at a fraction of the cost of a phone call. It also allowed farmers to have up-to-date information on market price for their product or to ask for the delivery of fertiliser or spare parts for those who had a truck, or to know when one of their relative living in a city had an opening for a temporary job (at a building site, for exemple). It was amazingly useful - and it was not designed for tourists. Though we were happy to use the places, we were often the only foreigners the guy in charge of the place had had for clients this year. And while it was slow, for text emails a 33.6 line is more than enough. You really wanted to kill spammers there though - downloading 50 spam emails using broadband is annoying, but on a shared 33.6k line it's a real pain
People who reacts to article like that by saying that internet is a luxury are missing the fact that basic internet services like emails or simple websites are in practice often the cheapest way to communicate - you get far more information out of your phone line. And even poor farmers in third-world countries need to communicate, if only to the nearest city. Internet is more than just a greater provider of pr0n and pirated music...
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motorbikes act as routers for a store-and-forward email system
...
I know a very similar store-and-forward messaging system that has the same kind of throughput and latency, has been working very well indeed for the longest time, and doesn't require people on the non-internet-connected dinky village side to have a computer : it's called the mail. The store-and-forward delivery system is called a postman
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I wrote: Even in the smallest towns (say, 20 inhabitants which is nothing in India)
;-)
I meant: Even in the smallest towns (say, 20k inhabitants which is nothing in India)
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If those bikes happen to be sponsored by AOL I will cry. Way to introduce a third-world (or is it second now?) to the joys of e-mail, namely SPAM.
E-mail to me doesn't seem a necessity in places where people rarely leave the village, let alone the country. Besides, how are you supposed to GET the e-mail address of someone if you don't have an internet connection? Let me guess, you write them a letter with your address included...
This isn't such a new idea - in the early eighties email to and from Australia was stored on tape and flown in and out of the US once a week.
1. "Damnit! The internet crashed again!" (motorcycle wrecks into sheep)
2. Someone carjacks you, along with your signal! (sheep takes your wheels)
3. Knowing that a bunch of pringles cans would prove easier than motorcycles.
The equipment that they built for cents a unit ends up being resold to them for huge markup values. Sure they have benefactors but they still have to pay a heck of a lot more than cents a unit. Yeah, this is the thing that this country really needs...how about food, an infastructure that they built - not benefactors, compassion and respect. This is just kind of, well, stupid.
Bob: Hey Charlie, you know what Cambodia needs?
Charlie: Doctors?
Bob: Nah!
Charlie: Food?
Bob: No way, they have plenty of rice!
Charlie: Respect from the global community?
Bob: Charlie, we are the strongest country i the world, respect ain't in our vocabulary!
Charlie: Well I give up then!
Bob: E-mail!
Charlie: I'm moving to Chile...
In Cambodia, motorbikes act as routers for a store-and-forward email system
Did anyone else read the first two words as 'In Canada'?
SpamNet - a spam blocker that really works
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of quarter-inch tapes."
Of course, this is on a slightly smaller scale, but I'm pretty sure that the quote fits.
~UP
Eat the Path.
Pigeons were used instead of email in India until 2002.
Avian carriers are used commercially even today to deliver digital photographs.
talk about pollution ! If the email can be transported by motor bike, then the distances musn't be much, how much would a simple cable connecting the different villages cost ? People should help/invest in getting them a proper infrastructure (electricity, phones, simple internet terminals). Now that people are switching to flat screens, I'm sure old computer hardware can be useful to such countries.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Gives new meaning to "the information super highway". In this case that would be a highway in a third world country with pot holes. Gotta say, might have been better if they used 4x4s, I mean at least there you have redundancy systems.
This is the lamest idea that I have ever heard. Is e-mail really what Cambodia needs? No. What Cambodia really needs is some non-agrarian jobs. It needs some industry. When it has some industry then it will have the money and incentive to build some infrastructure including better transportation and the Internet. Then they will have to power to do it themselves which will make it much better for them anyway. So next time that somebody considers outsourcing your job to India, maybe you should suggest Cambodia as a more charitable alternative.
Here I go, posting it like it's a big joke, and look, it's already been freakin' implelemted!
So hard to come up with a new killer app these days...:-D
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
The nifty AX.25 packet radio based Auto Packet Reporting System (APRS) enables each station in a network to act as a packet repeater, so that stations that can't communicate directly, can do so via other stations [& digipeaters], as necessary.
C.f. the White Paper at:
http://vk6.aprs.net.au/ukaprswp.pdf
Implelelelelelelelmemtde. Blahhhhhhhhh.
Even "Preview" isn't my friend today.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Someday, I want a motorhome, so that I can tool around to National Parks in the US and still be able to have refrigerated salsa and my Playstation 2. And in this dream, I also have wireless networking between my motorhome and other motorhomes in the campground, and there are hotspots at the dumping station and at ranger stations and at nearby truckstops, so that as I'm cruising around the country, I can keep getting email, do a little surfing, and for the webcam mounted on the dash to send updates out to the blog. And if the folks in the next campsite have the same system in their motorhome, then we can have a lan party, until it is time for the Park Ranger to talk about wolf ecology over at the campfire.
Information wants to be $1.98/lb.
This is great.
When I order pizza, it comes by motorcycle. Now the same bike brings the internet too. My dream of ordering pizza on the internet has finally come true! Wait a minute...
I got a feeling of deja vu reading this - I'm a Science Fiction writer, and I have a system in my universe where spaceships/planets handle communications the same way. Communications between star systems aren't possible, but ships carrying packets of data (duplicated across multiple ships) arrive, disgorge, load up and somehow the whole mess of data resolves itself.
Even though my books are humour, and I don't explicitly detail the comms method above, that's what I have to abide by. It does lead to workarounds in the plot where a guy in system A needs to call someone in system B. Also, no realtime conversations.
On a separate note, the 3rd novel in the series involves the bad guys trying to plant evidence so they can sue over theft of code. Don't know where that idea came from.
Cheers,
Simon
Hal Spacejock
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
As most of you know, it's been done already for ages, using pigeons instead of motorbikes. The IP-over-Pigeons technology even has itw own RFC, which of course predates the implementation. Talk about a mature technology !
article here
Ah... life is good.
Wow the implications! Think of it! Instant Messaging... Errh wait...
"Sorry, I sent the email but it ran out of gas... You'll get it tomorrow."
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
or even better how come I cant walk around and connect to the internet anywhere in the country? Isn't it time that we should be able to watch dvds, play video games, watch tv, listen to satellite radio, talk on our cellphones and surf the internet all while driving down the free way?
Trix are for kids!
Bah, the Mars rovers have a fairly high-speed connection with a 15-20 minute round-trip delay. This story is about getting connectivity into really hard to reach places! :^)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I spent seven months there last year. It was fun and CHEAP. For instance, rent was $60/month in Sihanoukville (port city on the coast, with beaches, etc.) and included cable TV with HBO etc. Meals are about a buck, for local food, 3-4 dollars for western food. Beers are 50 cents, pack of cigs is about the same. Internet cafes run about 75 cents an hour. Total bills about 400 a month, with rent, food, repairs, gas, beer, weed, cigs, ladies, etc...
:) 20 Women on you in a second saying "Oooh, handsome man" and grabbing you.. $5 goes a looong way here. University girls wanting some extra cash. Go to the ports and the price is much lower I hear.
There are 4 paved highways in the country, creatively named Highway 1,2,3,4.. The rest of the country is dirt roads. Most of the motorcycles are Sanyangs, and Citi's all made from honda plans, in chinese factories. I miss my Sanyang 90. Many people think moped looking things are lame, but they do go for a week on a dollars worth of gas. And they do not break much. There are many places to fix them.. Imagine an Indy 500 pit crew. You pull in, explain what is wrong and six guys with wrenches descend upon your bike.. 20 minutes later a new piston ring is in place.
Bigger bikes are usually dirt bikes. Knobby tires etc. The roads are BAD. During the rainy season (June - Oct) whole roads disappear. Nothing but mud. I loved it! Dirt bikes are a lot of fun, until you have an accident and the nearest hospital is 100km away.. I recommend spending 1500 on a dirt bike. Less than that you will fix it a LOT. All are stolen from japan, and none have a working lock..
Weed is legal to buy, and many bars/restaurants have a jay or two being passed around at all times. Language is not a problem as 30% speak english, and Mandarin/cantonese. All places tourists are at speak GOOD english. Not like Thailand for instance. The people are friendly, IE a huge downpoor and I pulled over, and spent the night at thier place. They scrounged up a mosquito net and a bed, etc.
Food is OK. I like Vietnamese, and Thai a lot better though. Seemed too sweet, and rarely spicy.
sExpats seem to like it a lot, as everything goes, and cheaply. Going into a bar is good for the ego
Beware the expats running bars, etc. All of them are losing money subsizing backpackers from Europe and the scams are rife. Oddly the locals, who are indeed very poor, are quite honest. They will "scam" you by charging an extra 10 cents for a beer, and they love to haggle, but really, the expats are the problem.
Not sure if this makes any sense as I am currently drunk in Xiamen China..
ps. If you lose your job, go to asia. You can live a LONG time on very little money here, and with a VOIP box, you could do phone interviews for 10 cents a minute.
The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
You're right - we should be talking about the second Mars rover now. After all it is using the same sort of flash memory as the other one - may not be much to say about it tomorrow.
I spent a month in Cambodia in 2001 and while an scheme like this has some merit its just not what they need.
They have only one real road in the entire country from Sihanoukville (the only port) to Phnom Penh (the capital). People in remote areas have almost no access to medical care unless they are able to make a long (up to 10hrs) journey in the back of a pick-up over the worst tracks you have ever seen.
A better use of the money would have been to fund road building programs, teams of visiting doctors / nurses and mobile clinics.
As a side note if you *had* to get email out to the provices I would have thought expanding the countries mobile phone network coverage (which is already pretty good) would have been cheaper in the long run and no matter how slow the connection would still be faster than waiting for the bike to show.
If you're interested in the type of projects that do work in Cambodia you may like to take a look at http://www.starfishcambodia.org
I'm hoping this website isn't sitting on some guy's motorbike. Please be gentle, folks: we don't want to slashdot a biker.
Yeah, sure it isn't a grand gesture and it isn't infrastructure you can put your hands on. On the other hand, look how much bang they're getting for their buck: The press release above says they spent $18,000 from a grant and they've got monthlies of a few hundred bucks a site? So call it $30,000, even $40,000 a year. You're not going to get much road for that, and only the village that gets the road is going to benefit. You might be able to fund one visiting team of clinicians for $40K, but again, that only helps the people who can get to the clinic. Sometimes it is okay to improve things incrementally.
Information wants to be $1.98/lb.
...don't read The Phnom Penh Post's Police Blotter much. Otherwise, they'd know that the most dangerous place to be in all of Cambodia is "on a motorbike". Seriously, it's crazy stuff. Watch out for people wielding axes over there, too. Yikes!
Hi,
just a correction
Tamil Nadu is not a poor state at all. It is one of the most prosperous state in agriculture and technology. Just see in US how many indians are from that state. Its capital chennai is also one of the 4 metros in india
Two years ago I had no Internet connection at home. All my email was transferred on floppies between home and office. I wrote four scripts for this purpose -- two for tar/split/tar of messages and another two for mount/cp/umount. Floppies are extremely unreliable these days, I've used two disks for redundancy.
All of my neighbours had no Internet too, I planned to "connect" them too. And then things changed. We got broadband connections.
Long time ago I heard rumors that some organizations transferred their email this way for security reasons.
... you insensitive clod!
Nah, seriously, that's really cool. Cambodians rely almost exlusively on small, 100 cc, 4-stroke. Mainly Daelims (Korean) and Honda (Japan) or Ssangyang (China methinks), like the one shown in the article photo (yeah, you should really RTFA). Silent, rugged, solid as hell, and you often see 4 adults on one moto.
There are lots and lots of "motodops" (as they call them there) riding throughout the country, and in remote places, they are the only means of transportation. Plus, most drivers use it to do exactly the same trip, day after day (personnal use, or driving other people around for a fee) So it'd be quite easy to extend this program to other regions. That way, you could fit the magic box on regular motodops that happen to be doing the same trip everyday in front of the school.
Still, it would have been cool to know about the tech specs of this little magic box. Some kind of old laptop mobo + wi-fi + smallish hard disk, perhaps?
(err, and can please someone help me: on the second picture of the article (click to enlarge), there is a straaaaange computer sitting next to an iMac. Somebody knows what's that?)
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
in the 1970s, sparking the uprising of the hyperextremist khmer rouge, which killed 2 million people...... and consdierng that their fields that those motorbikes run through are littered with unexploded ordinance from our bombers and from landmines (many made in USA) i think we should be doing a a lot more than that
I really wanted to come up with a good joke here...but nothing seemed to fit. I guess guys carrying emails on motorcycles is pretty funny all by itself!
How about a Beowolf cluster of these things?
I guess I am an insensitive clod!
Free your ecomony and enact the FairTax
http://www.comebackalive.com/df/dplaces/cambodia/i ndex.htm
which is why the villages are now ghost towns of old people and babies
but the ping rates were pretty bad. ;-)
Sometimes when not looking I will tube words that aren't even close but start with the same letter or something. It's actually quite odd, I'm not sure exactly what it would be called...
..and let's not forget teh Freudian slips to the ex girlfriend when she prings up our relationship and I try to make valid points abou tit...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Playing quake with 24 hour pings is a new experience, I hear it's like playing a game of chess.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a motorbike full of... oh, wait.
Just wait until next week, when India's news sources start reporting on the loss of outsourcing contracts to Cambodian developers living in villages...!
-----------------------
You are what you think.
As far as I can tell (since I've never been), there is only one reason to go to Cambodia, and let me tell you, it has nothing to do with checking your email while you're spending time in Svay Pak...
Works the same way as sending mail to the styx in the US. Users don't need to have a dedicated incoming address.
To: postmaster@somevillage
Subject: ATTN: Whoever
The message will get to the right person the next time they happen to drop in to the post office to check their mail.
I'd say that as simple and relatively inexpensive as the scheme sounds, it should certainly be worth at least a try. I'm sure it's a hell of a lot cheaper than the current Rover mission, for all *that* does to directly benefit the third world.
Communication and education are necessary ingredients in the transition to an industrial society. One of those emails could include a whole lesson on some vital skill or area of interest to a young Cambodian child, prepared by a volunteer school system in Paris or New Jersey. A digital photograph of a wound or infection might save that child's life by bringing a surgeon on the *next* motorcycle.
Pollution? Please. I imagine the Cambodians don't have tons of surplus fuel just lying around to burn. The very nature of the situation means that the system will evolve in the least wasteful way possible. Of course a bike pollutes, but I doubt these provinces are Los Angeles....
This is just a start. Think back to when email was exclusively the province of Universities and the occasional large corporation, or when the Web was brand new. The Internet was growing slowly back then because public interest it hadn't reached a critical mass: it just wasn't on the radar screen.
If there are enough emails pouring in and out of a province by motorcycle, all those people may just educate themselves on how to build a repeater station halfway between their village and the next, pool their resources, and now another village has a live Pringle's can connection to the nearest motorcycle-served village...or all the way to Pheom Penh.
Sheesh. If you want to help, instead of whining about mispent money, learn French or Cambodian and *send* a volunteer tech support email by motorcycle to one of these villages. And while you're at it, pull that shitty old 10GB 5400 RPM hard drive out of your closet, partition it for 'em, and have *that* arrive at the village at the same time as your email on how to install it on the local node.
I think you need to get some perspective on the whole project here. For nearly 10 years, this project has built more than 100 schools in inaccessible parts of Cambodia. They have introduced a telemedicine program in which village nurses can get medical advice from urban doctors. This internet connection isn't just "e-mail;" it's a link to commerce, education and information. It's fine to make fun, but the intent is earnest and important in a country where a 100 mile distance between villages can mean a five or six-hour truck ride. I think the irony is that you haven't given any evidence of your charity. Maybe you should build a school./
http://www.camnet.com.kh/cambodiaschools
For BYTE magazine, on his Winnebiko!
http://microship.com/bike/winnebiko/across.html
Very small point, but the text that describes this story is actually from my site, Wi-Fi Networking News. We're not claiming to have written deathless prose, but the text of the submission is from here, where we wrote about this event on Jan. 25.
I'm not asking for traffic, apologies, or whatever, but when you write something and see someone else's name attached to it, it feels strange.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
Wow, could you imagine if someone wanted to run a webserver over this thing? If it got slashdotted,that would be truly something to see.
The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. -- ee cummings
If you had bothered to read the article, you would have learned some of the wonderful things that cheaper communications do for people. We're talking about doctors colaborating, vilages being given a greater voice in govenment and all people having better access to information that really matters to their daily lives. It's no surprise that someone who spends their time being a first rate smart ass would think of it as spam delivery mechianism.
Other candidates for work like this include Cambodians lucky enough to have gotten a US education and US $ from work here, and Cambodians looking to make a buck. Now that the system is in place, anyone who travels can get a box and be a mail man. There's money in that.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of quarter-inch tapes."
--Dennis Ritchie (attr.)
Or in this case "... a saddlebag full of hard drives."
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
How are you going to ride a motorcycle to Mars?
The system is funded in part through U.S. benefactors who aren't just sending money; they're spending time there as well.
I've seen US benefactors at work in these countries before. There is always an alterior motive. I would like to know who the benefactors are.
When staying in a Bankok hotel for example, there is usualy at least one group of americans there to unleash the Lord's word in these Buddhist countries.
They spend 1 month travelling through Thailand or useing Thailand as a gateway to Vietnam, Burma, Laos etc. The several christian churches in Thailand, for example, do not want them there, as it usually entails the suited, burly foreigners lumbering through some area spreading their 'freedom'.
This undoes the gentle, tentative work already done by the few christian churches. There will be more to this than just getting email to the people.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
Hey everyone, A friend gave me this link so I thought I'd check it out and give my two cents. I was one of the three people who worked locally on this project in Cambodia to install this system, which BTW is called the DAKNET system. (Dak means "post" in India). Like I mentioned, there were three of us installing the network in the remote villages in the Ratanakiri province, close to Vietnam and Laos. I live in Boston and travelled there to install the system with one collegue whom also lives in Boston, and a third young man who lives in India. We are all in our late 20's and have relatively good computer experience, but I definitely can't boast given the present company. :->
It was an amazing experience and an even more amazing project in all. The possibilities of it are endless. I think that the New York Times article was the best so far that I have read about the project and prase the writer to actually bring the reader into the area and witness what the Daknet system can do.
Cambodia was only a pilot prototype of this system and there has been much interest in many other regions and countries that would like to implement the same type system. Keep an eye out, because this system is going to eventually bring the last mile into the online world... one village at a time.
Motor bikes were the chosen method of transport for that region, mainly because they were the only way to travel efficiently through the jungle roads (or more appropriately "lack of roads"). It is important to note that the mobile access points (or MAPs for short) can be mounted to any mobile vehicle, such as a car, bus, etc. Actually, the first implementation of this network was orginally designed to have the MAP run on a PocketPC which was lead on the back of a donkey! At that time, the system was appropriately named "DonkeyNet". I think the motorbike idea is a little bit more efficient. ;-)
One thing that will always stand out in my mind is going to the different villages, almost all of which does not even have power, with loads of computer equipment to hook into solar panels. All this in a small village that has never even seen a picture of a computer before. There were a couple of villages that even a truck could not get to, so we had to physically take the computer equipment to them via ox-cart. Talk about irony! It looked absolutely silly bringing high tech wireless broadband equipment in a cart carried by oxen. Very amuzing though.
Actually, I'll post a picture if anyone is interested... Here's the link:
www.sashas-stuff.net/photos/ox-cart.jpg
Well anyway, the entire project took a little more than a month to physically install (not including development of course), and we covered 15 villages, a medicine clinic, and the governer's office before we were done.
It was an absolutely unforgettable experience and I was very honored to be able to take part in such an extraordinary project.
I'll check back from time to time in case anyone has any questions. ;-)
Regards,
- Sasha W.
It might even be possible to set up permanent connections using a similar method to the proposed stationary airship solutions being tested in the US, Japan and UK.
For cheapness go for tethered hydrogen balloons carrying a wifi unit up to 1000m which talks to the ground and to other balloons flown from nearby villages. Configure it as a routed network but keep with the store/forward technology like email and usenet much like the Internet of 15 years ago for robustness. Mail and news comes in at a reasonable rate, minutes or hours instead of days and no, or fewer satellite uplinks required.
Hydrogen you say with fear and loathing. Look they ran the early airships for long periods using hydrogen, it's cheap and just needs a solar cell and some salt water to manufacture. The unit isn't going to carry any people and could be tethered out of the way where it won't fall on anyone.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
The first 2004 issue of IEEE Computer has a similar story DakNet: Rethinking Connectivity in Developing Nations (need membership to access). It even shows a nice picture of MAP-enabled Honda bike and an ox cart!
It is a digital pony express: five Motomen ride their routes five days a week, downloading and uploading e-mail.
And thus emerged the new Cambodian WARrior caste.
Hello,
I have provided technical support to these and related projects, which were initiated by journalist and MIT Media Lab member Bernard Krisher, in Cambodia from Japan for several years. However there is a limit to what I can tell you since I did not make Motoman myself and have not been to the site. Perhaps someone else on the project is seeing this, I'll also mention to the project leader.
In the past I have mentioned this project in Slashdot threads and made I think the first public presentation on it at GLOCOM in Tokyo last year. Bernie has in Cambodia created a newspaper, an orphanage, about 200 schools, a major hospital, and a telemedicine program among other things. The Princess Diana fund for landmine injuries was involved and we sold a poster from photomosaic.org. A campaign was set up to buy mosquito nets to save a family from malaria for a few bucks. This is all because Bernie Krisher now retired felt it was time to give something back to the world. He puts himself physically on the line. Also the two of us did the northkorea.org project FYI which is closed but got about a quarter million dollars during the famine (the first well publicized one) in North Korea. The design is crude but I was able to update it quickly over telnet for a number of years for nothing, and the feedback loop we made got onto CNN twice and gathered many donors.
About Cambodia: most of Cambodia has no phones, no electricity, no mail, nothing! It is really a different world, like maybe 3rd or 4th world. A lot of the things I suggested when hearing about the Motoman project from Bernie were not logistically possible, or not the most important considering the extreme focus needed to get this sort of thing going.
For example the email network is not open to the outside Internet, though at MIT there is an engine which will get search results based on emailed requests. There is no realtime email through a satellite or ham (I'd like to find out more about that if anyone is knowledgeable about ham radio in this area since I suggested it). I suggested that teachers would be able to network together on a mailing list they share, but while this might happen one day at the moment it is all administered centrally. It is extremely cool that the governor is suddenly on the email though, and they take it seriously. The people at MIT and in Cambodia have already accomplished a lot. The bikes also can be used in emergencies to get sick people or to deliver medicine. As I understand it, it is a major undertaking just to get drivers and daily issues that crop up squared away, the bikes don't even stop unless they are specially flagged to do so. But they have already I believe delivered one girl to a hospital for a serious problem.
If you have information about satellite, balloon or ham radio in the area, or about 3rd world computing (simputer and I believe there was a Laotian computer) I'd like to know (mattr atnospam telebody dotcom). Please also cc to bernie atnospam media dot mit dot edu (since my email provider is not happy and my vps is not set up yet). Also anyone can participate by making donations, for example in the cambodia schools project the world bank provides a matching donation and you get your name on a school. For a little more you can get them a solar panel and maybe computer for email, which makes it the village communications hub. And calling all geeks, your expertise may very well be welcomed if you are willing to go to Cambodia, even for a short time maybe.
As someone asked about the address, email bernie or I believe there is a camnet address, if you want to contact those villages. No bang path (though I have mentioned it, and fidonet..) Someone (andreMA) mentioned troposphere scatter. (or heck, meteor trail scatter..) if anyone has concrete information about that I'd like to know. Someone asked about pringles cans. I did a bunch of net research a while back and it looked like a Yagi antenna or any line of site tower would basically be bound by the
Soekris makes a variety of little boxes and boards, mostly for low-power small applications. Based in Santa Cruz California.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
FYI, we have also posted this on our site: http://www.firstmilesolutions.com/DakNet_IEEE_Comp uter.pdf (450KB)
Engineers interested in facilitating "Village Area Network" deployments internationally should get in touch with us.
Amir
Jobs of the future: you too can become a e-mailman!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?