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Solar Wi-Fi To Bring Net to Developing Countries
JLavezzo writes "TreeHugger.com has an article today on a new wifi development organization: MIT and the UN have teamed up to provide kids living in the world's least developed nations $100 laptops, their 2 watts of juice provided by hand or foot crank. Cool, but - and this was one of Bill Gates' criticisms - what's a computer without internet access? Enter Green Wi-Fi, a non-profit that seeks to provide 'last mile internet access with nothing more than a single broadband internet connection, rooftops and the sun.' Their wi-fi access nodes, which consist of a small solar panel, a heavy-duty battery, and a router, can be linked together to extend one internet connection into a larger network. The two guys who started the company - Bruce Baikie and Marc Pomerleau - happen to be veterans of Sun Microsystems. Deployment is set to start in India at the end of this summer."
Now not only can citizens of impoverished countries starve due to gross mismanagement of funds by their governments (who are themselves living very well off of foreign aid intended for the citizens) but they can IM each other about who has more flies.
If they already have problems with power, etc., how will they get a broadband Internet connection? I guess you could use WDS or something to extend the range, but I don't think that's a very practical solution.
What's with people leaving Sun Microsystems & starting theese great projects to bring people & information together ?
Didn't someone on the top of Googles command chain come from Sun ?
Sun may produce some seemingly "bloated" stuff, but they damn sure produce some fine people also.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Now Indians will have to deal with Indian tech support.
Its hard to believe that anyone who had actually visited some of the least developed countries could post something about computers and WiFi to help them out. When I was in Malawi for example, the people didn't know what electricity was. There was only one water spigot in the entire village, at the whitemans church. The only piece of technology they could recognize was my wristwatch, which they were in awe over. My $1000 digital camera? They couldn't even 'see' it: they had no reference as to what it was, might was well have been a rock.
They dont even have shoes. These people's most valuable posessions are sticks. I'm not kidding. Sticks are fuel for cookfires. They walk all day with a hundred pound of sticks on their back, with no shoes, no roads.
Now, these people cant read either. Can you not see how pretentious it is to expect them to value a laptop with WiFi when they are starving and can't read?
Get them some shoes first. That will help them a lot more.
For both out of range "country" areas (some of the most beautiful lands you'll ever see, btw.); and simple urban expansion. Maybe something similar to this could spur an adoption of solar panels on homes that could take a dent out of our energy use enough to stop rolling blackouts. Imagine if you could, buying/installing a system on your home that would not only cut your energy bill, but give you free high speed wifi to boot. Most states have a buyback system on any energy you produce, and it wouldn't take much energy "sold back" to pay for the cost of broadband and a profit for the maintainers.
~Rebecca
The complaints are coming, so let me just preempt them. Yes, money should be spent on feeding people. Yes, they need food, water, and medical care first and foremost. The problem is that the basic necessities of life are not enough.
The rich nations of the world could divert massive portions of their GDP to feed the impoverished world. Even if you could political find the will to do this, it would solve nothing. Poverty is a symptom of a much larger problem. The core of the problem lies in education. If they can be educated, they can save themselves. Hence, things like cheap Wi-fi while certainly is not a silver bullet, it at least begins to pick away at the problem.
Education is the key. With education and access to information other problems can start be solved. Good democratic governance absolutely demands an education population that is able to vote outside of tribal ties. Educated leaders are need to tackle both social and economic problems, and not just in government, but in business as well. The core of a functional democratic government is an educated population. We can feed the impoverished nations of the world from now until the end of time, but until educated leaders step up they will remain impoverished.
So yes to those that will surely complain about this "waste" of money, these people need food and clean water. Food and water is not the cure though. Education, information, a fiscal boost once good governance is in place are the solution. Throwing money at the worlds poor just to feed them is like pumping blood into a man with a severed artery; the problem isn't that he is running out of blood, the problem is that he has a severed artery.
please refer to any of the past OLPC post. These are not countries in extreme poverty. They have an infrastructure in plance. The projects are designed to break the cycle of poverty. Unless you teach these people to survive in a 21st century workplace, you can give them all the aid you want and it will not help. I repeat, BREAK THE CYCLE OF POVERTY, and the programs are not designed for countries with extreme poverty, but ones with an infrastructure in place
This sig is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
What about Wifi Baloons? This may become very cheap, and cover a much larger area.
I wish them luck. In my opinion, using wi-fi for this application is really pushing a technology way past what it was actually designed for. There are so many points of failure and a lot of equipment that comes so close to working perfectly...yet fails for unknown reasons. There are issues with bandwidth and interference from the limited channels (maybe over there with no FCC, they can one-up us on that one?).
I was talking to someone who has also deployed wi-fi just the other day. His honest opinion of his equipment was that the companies selling wi-fi seem to be more interested in selling a lot of equipment than they were in spending the time to develop solid equipment that actually worked and worked solidly.
Of course, I smell MESH networks, and nothing sounds cooler than a wireless MESH network...but in my experience, there is also a lot hype there that also falls flat when you actually try and deploy it.
Of course, some of our problems have resulted in some crappy boards we were sold, but even if they were working 100%, I'm still less than impressed with wi-fi on a large scale like that.
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
So, I tend to like seeing these "brick-and-mortar"--and workable--solutions actually come to market.
Sigs cause cancer.
"One laptop per kid" isn't necessary. Even if there's only a single connected computer in the whole village, it will vastly expand their horizons.
One of the great tragedies of poor countries is that a little knowledge could help them make much better use of their limited resources. If I couldn't afford a pair of shoes, I'd google for information about making some... if I had access to the Net.
Rule of law and basic economic freedom seem to provide the best means out of poverty, every time it is implemented, and roads might help that effort along.
I know building the Interstate Highway system in the USA seems to have done wonders in a country that was doing well anyhow, but how about it? Aren't roads high tech enough to be sexy?
After all, how do you deliver X (medicine, water purifiers, food, laptops and WiFi set-ups) without roads?
On the other hand, the cynical side of me thinks... if you put solar powered anything that might have any other use... it will get stolen.
Maybe you really do need "rule of law" first.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Now not only can citizens of impoverished countries starve due to gross mismanagement of funds by their governments (who are themselves living very well off of foreign aid intended for the citizens) but they can IM each other about who has more flies.
Not exactly. The number of flies in each location will stabilize, as the flies travel through the series of tubes that make up the internet. Don't get me wrong: the internet is not a truck. So don't even think that it is.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I find it hard to believe that you made it to a country as remote as Malawi without travelling through areas that had roads, buildings, plumbing and power-- but the inhabitants live in such poverty that access to a computer is an impossible dream and the best job they could hope for is a Nike sweatshop. This program is for them-- the parts of the "Third World" that are 50 years behind, not 500.
You're exactly right, Wi-fi is a last-meter solution, and people are trying to use it for last-mile and more. It'd be wonderful to see a solar-powered wireless mesh network, but not running 802.11anything!
What's interesting is that the Ricochet network has already been designed, deployed, proven, mismarketed, and abandoned. Metricom's routing protocol was vastly superior to anything else in this space, and now YDI's got the patents locked up.
Airespace was founded by a bunch of ex-Metricom brains, and it looks like they built many of the same smarts into the same casing. Then Airespace got bought by Cisco and they call it the 1500. I wouldn't mind playing with a few dozen of these.
Anyway, if someone could convince YDI to open the intellectual property, that warehouse full of Ricochet poletops could be deployed anywhere in the world. The modems are cheap, the hardware is bulletproof, and did I mention they go a mile on the stock rubber ducks?
I managed a huge wireless ISP using 802.11b, then later g as well, as well as 900MHz and 5.8Ghz gear. The "weird" problems all our competitors had, and you apparently had are all caused by not knowing what you are doing. Use quality components, including connectors and cable, and install them right and things will be great. Several of our wireless backbone links had better uptime than the fibre we used to connect our network to the internet.
A man is in the desert dying of thirst. A guy on a camel comes up to him and offers him a jug of water for his diamonds which he gladly trades.
An illterate family is dying of hunger somewhere in a Africa. Someone offers them a loaf of bread to melt down their free solar powered wi-fi station and latop as scrap metal. They gladly trade.
That's the problem in these places where people are starving and illiterate. Any kind of infrastructure you put in is just going to be sold as scrap for food. This might not be the case in India, where people aren't starving to death and are not totally uneducated, but this kind of thing has happened over and over again in Africa. People put in an elaborate desert irrigation system to grow food and all the pipe fittings are stolen and sold as scrap metal.
This is why the people who are promoting Solar Cooking are doing so in third world countries. Solar cooking means they don't have to spend so much time looking for firewood, and they can keep their trees. Plus, it helps stave off global warming a little bit.
Both. Now quit offering these simplistic and narrow-minded false alternatives.
Did it ever occur to you that in order to deliver aid, people might need communications capability? Or that the vast majority of people are not dying of being poor, they're living with it. This means that if they're going to improve their lot - and everyone on the face of this earth has that right - they might need access to information in order to do so?
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
You're absolutely right about basic infrastructure. Transport and communications are integral to a viable economy. This, by the way, is exactly why we need tools like solar powered wireless - to bootstrap communications in areas where 'proper' infrastructure of the kind you see in North America or western Europe is just plain impossible.
You'll be glad to know, by the way, that the US is devoting USD 68 million to the country where I work to do exactly that. It's building roads, airstrips and wharfs. By all accounts, it's one of the best-run development projects this country has seen since colonial times.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Read everything before mod-ding me down -- there's some germane material which won't make the cut-off...
How do you propose the family of four get medical care for a year be distributed (and used by the proper recipients)?
You have control of the resources before it reaches TPTB (The Powers That Be). Once it's there, however, all bets are off.
Here's an example:
You see people panhandling for money. Offer to take them in the nearest restaurant. Give management enough money...with the understanding it can only be used for the person in question and anything left over goes in the tip jar. The person you're helping is polite (if you're lucky) but refuses.
Does this mean:
1) They aren't hungry and anticipate having enough the next time he's hungy?
2) you've determined the reason they need the money is to buy some MD2020 (it's a wine -- Mad Dog 20/20 - you're better off to drink battery acid. I cannot imagine a hangover on it. Find some at a cheap-o liquor store try a little, and pitch it - it's an experiment -- not unlike a deep-friend twinkie or Snickers bar at a state fair. I buy whatever is new that year for a one-bite taste by tearing it off, passing the rest off to anyone else wanting a taste. If you are clueless about these deep-fried foods, consider yourself fortunate) or some other booze (or drug)?
3) they need the money for something else - something positive? e.g., sick kid to the clinic?
4) they really rake in the $$$ asking for money and have no reason to find a job.
5) sitting there kills time vs. sitting in the library and doing nothing.
6) ???
You've got the money in hand. How do you decide how it's distributed and how much to give them? (I have a personal pattern|policy, but we won't worry about that right now)
If you hand over the the funds, you have a good chance of believing it will be diverted. That's when the Time photo of Bono means squat. "Forgive the countries which can't pay their debts. It's crippling them trying to keep up." (read that: we're loan sharks) We clear the slate, they have nothing. We give them money, it goes the same place all of the other money has gone. Bono goes oh-fer by asking us to wipe the debts again. Fortunately, none of his money was diverted and he can continue to wear kool-yellow glasses.
If we give them "clean water, a secure food supply, basic medicine, reasonable security...for a year", how do you prevent the hard goods from being sold to another group|country for $$$ or exchanged in some other fashion? Reasonable security? Right now, we're in a bad spot right now [1] -- although we have now have an exit policy [2] and have to intervene in how many other companies using a fleet of UN black helicopters? If it's a UN and not US issue, there's plenty of representation from the countries who are robbing their people blind and have already diverted all of the funds. I hear a One World Order being proposed by someone coming in from the side door.
Lots of fine wishes, but it's not going to happen in the real world. Anyone for a video game? World Conquest & Domination? Wait. Something near to that was in Never Say Never Again.
__________________
[1] A man goes to hell and is greeted by Satan who explains the rules: "I'm going to walk you through a long hallway of rooms. You'll be able to look inside and determine if you want to stay there for eternity [or not]. If you choose to pass but find everything after it is worse, you cannot return. Again, once you pass, you cannot return." They go to the first room and all of the surfaces are so hot people are doing everything they can to avoid contact - jumping off of the floor, wall, taking turns standing on each other, etc. "I'll pass. There's no way I could handle that for eternity." "Fine. But you cannot return if everything else is worse." They go to room #2. Everything must be very cold because the vapor from everyone's breath can be seen in the air and everyone
Hey Green Wi-Fi people, if you're listening, I agree with the parent poster. How about you put the schematics for your designs online so we can all build these? Open Source philosophy and all that, the more of us building them the more eyes and hands to find improvements and bug fixing... I'm helping two community networks in the UK where they are really concerned about ecological issues and they've actually already asked me if they could power their roof top access points by solar energy. I think you could be the solution. Please could you put the designs online, creative commons them, so we can build some?
Everybody loves the Ronja guy for putting his optical networking designs online....
Textbook 1: Sex Ed.
Chapter 1: Aids
a. You get Aids from having sex with someone who has AIDS.
b. You can't cure aids by having sex with a baby.
Chapter 2: etc.
Might be worth something