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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.
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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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 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...
"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.
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.
Since they're using an off-the-Internet store and forward system, I wonder if that email address would need a !bang path? (Perhaps a bang-bang path if the motorcycle is running rough.) UUCP lives on.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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
Nah, we use the GOOSE option: since the geese migrate every fall we write up a bunch of e-mails and store them until fall. We them have to go and capture a goose with our bare hands and use seal fat to adhere the e-mails (written by hand of course) to the goose. We then have to walk home which is usually 60-70 miles away and it is UPHILL both ways!
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...
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 !
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Along with the practical applications of such a system, consider also the following benefits...
School children and teachers will be able to research educational web sites to further their education. Local farmers will be able to communicate with other villages and towns to sell their crops to interested buyers, and vice versa. Villagers that require assistance will be able to order groceries and supplies from other towns that could deliver the goods to the village. Sick people, through the help the village doctor, will be able to explain illnesses to qualified doctors elsewhere around the world for advice, and even attach a picture or movie file of the illness with the email. Teachers will be able to cooperate with other teachers and school boards to encourage children's education and attendance. Also, friends and family can keep in touch no matter how far the distance between them. The potential is endless, and the overall benefits of such a system is going to revolutionize these remote reaches forever.
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