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WiFi Lifeline For Nepal's Farmers
bahree writes "BBC is running a pretty interesting story on how yak farmers in the mountains of Nepal, where there are no phones or other means of communication, are using wireless Internet technology to keep in touch with their families, buy/sell livestock and exchange vetinerary tips."
Electricity in some of these areas is not easy to come by. The valley below Mt Everest shares a hydro electric generator via a community coop. The electricity amounted to slightly over one 60 watt lightbulb per house.
There are computers to be found. They do have Internet all the way to the Everest base camp now. But most of the people in the region are living very simple lives. Collecting yack dung to burn for heat and fertilizer.
Great people if you ever get a chance to visit.
my father taught at a nepalese school as research for his thesis, and some of the comments from the students, about how long it takes to get to school, are astounding.
how about 1 weeks walk plus a 2 hour helicopter ride for one student, 3 day walk and 2 day bus ride for another. this is not just a handful of students either, very remote communities.
Many move to the school, and do not return home until completed years later, simply because it takes so long, by the time they got home they would have to return to school!
so, this has to be good for farmers in similar situations.
Back in March there was a bit of discussion on the wireless-longhaul list regarding setup in Nepal.
0 4-March.txt.gz
http://openict.net/pipermail/wireless-longhaul/
The list-archive front end seems to eat much of the text, but it's all there in the gzipped archive:
http://openict.net/pipermail/wireless-longhaul/20
Agreed that the terrain is not as demanding as in Nepal (flat plains vs. extremely hilly), but the goals look similar. They also have a pretty Coverage Map
The ranges they get out of wifi links are also pretty good - 5kms is on ordinary antennas, while with properly aimed parabolic antennae (antennas?) they get upto 40 kms (25 miles)
US is now divided as the "Red" and "blue" states. Red States = communist countries. Coincidence? I think not
Um how about in most Australian capital cities where there are still many suburbs which can't even get broadband due to crappy wiring. I'm about a 15 minute drive from the central business district and I have 1500/256 adsl. A mate of mine who's literally a 10 minute walk down the road can't get it in his area, even though he's in a brand new development area (ie. under 5 years old) and the exchange supports it. He gets about 28800 baud with his dialup account.
:)
Another friend of mine just bought a new house in a recent development area and he can't get broadband there either. He's actually sharing the cost of broadband with someone just down the road who CAN get it, and they've got wireless set up between their houses.
Telstra have a lot of bloody answering to do.
And I don't mean phone calls
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
If your interested in wireless sensor networks, we're working on that stuff at UC Berkeley. Heres a link to the home page. http://webs.cs.berkeley.edu/tos/ Go to the publications link if you want details.
PersonalTelco has an excellen review on Open Source Wi-Fi software. Could be something for Nepal's farmers!
Have a decent read of the above link. It is a fascinating story. Anyone know what the current status of the school is?
See also http://nepalwireless.net/ as indicated on the BBC page.
Wind and solar. Part of their infrastructure is half-way up trees on the sides of mountains, so it's pretty exposed and ideal for wind and sun.
This is where the serious fun begins.
Probably the complete lack of a working mobile phone network in the mountains was a good reason for this. Can't really see a mobile being a lot of use without one. They had to build an entire communications network.
They chose wi-fi because it is cheap, easy to install/maintain, relatively power efficient and available off the shelf.
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