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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?
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!
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!
No, last time it was carrier-pidgeons with memory sticks.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
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
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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Dude, that was bicycles in Laos. Totally different. Sheesh.
KFG
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
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...
Romantic as hell, part of the myth of the Old West.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
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
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 believe that motorcycles are a short-term solution, until Avian 'flu has been eradicated ;)
This is where the serious fun begins.
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.