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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
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.