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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.'"
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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
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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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.
The problem being, or course, that they have no postal service in the relevant locations.
Postal service requires the carrying of literally tons of mail, which requires buildings, personel to do the sorting, loading etc, but most of all it requires trucks and the improved roads to carry them.
A motorbike with a Linksys strapped to the seat can go where where a postal truck can't and only requires a single person to run the show.
I was once living in a little Mexican village only 50 miles from the nearest post office. It took the truck 14 hours to cover that 60 miles. Postal service was not what you could call regular. A 30 year old Hodaka Wombat could have covered the same route in about 6 hours.
And that was on what would be considered an improved road in much of Cambodia.
KFG
Pigeons were used instead of email in India until 2002.
Avian carriers are used commercially even today to deliver digital photographs.
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
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 !
...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
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
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.
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.
Your wish is answered... :-)
The box, which we referred to as MAPs (Mobile Access Points) and FAPs (Fixed Access Points), were actually little kits that were made by a company called Sokres (sp?).
Each one of them (MAP and FAP) have a small 200Mhz processor inside it, and expansion slots for one Compact Flash and two PCMCIA cards.
We put the entire boot sector on the compact flash as well as the storage partition for the email files. Each box has a 256 MB card, but can be upgraded if needed (excepting the Root HUB which has a 512MB card).
We utilized only one of the two PCMCIA slots with a 802.11b card which had an external antenna pigtail. The pigtail then connected to the WiFi antenna that was mounted outside the school.
Since the sokres boxes required very little power, they were a great option to use with the solar powered schools as well as off of the bateries of the motorbikes.
Hope that helped,
- Sasha W.
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