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Google Invests In Broadband For Poorer Countries
Chris Wilson writes "According to the Financial Times, Google has announced their support for a new initiative called O3B to 'bring internet access to 3bn people in Africa and other emerging markets by launching at least 16 satellites to bring its services to the unconnected' by 2010. Coverage is available from Yahoo and the Wall Street Journal as well. 'The $750m project to connect mobile masts in a swath of countries within 45 degrees of the equator to fast broadband networks ... could bring the cost of bandwidth in such markets down by 95 per cent.' This will probably be the largest single investment in network infrastructure for developing countries in history. Google clearly wishes to use this project to enable broadband Internet access in developing regions, but many other things must be in place before that can happen, including fixed power infrastructure, PCs or OLPCs, technical support and skills, and useful content and services for areas with lower literacy."
This will probably be the largest single investment in network infrastructure for developing countries in history. Google clearly wishes to use this project to enable broadband Internet access in developing regions...
Ok. Let's get a few things straight here. Phrases like "will probably" and "clearly wishes" are indicative of slant because they don't tell me anything. Let me tell you what's clear here: Google is making an upfront investment to reach 3 billion new customers. Yes, it's great news for those people but I will spell out the only motive Google has--they do not want another homegrown Baidu popping up in Swahili or any other language. They will reach these people first and hand them Google in their native language.
Google's going to bring these people broadband at 95% of their current price and Google's going to make massive profit. In 2007, Google netted $4.2 billion. They are supporting O3B because it is a smart business move and their stock will go up because of it.
I'm not saying this is a bad thing, it's great for the people but Google's only motive is "How do we reach the other 1/2 of the world's population with our services?"
My work here is dung.
That's where all tech support departments are these days.
Food, water and broadband.
For only $99/month*, you could provide a child with Facebook and MySpace.
(*) For the first year of service. Offer void where prohibited by law. Not really. Please see a doctor if broadband persists for more than four hours.
So...16 satellites in LEO, meaning intermittent coverage, plus they will need spares and steerable ground antennas. I'd like to see an article with all the technical details, but it doesn't sound practical for providing continuous high bandwidth links...and it seems pretty expensive for covering only a belt around the equator.
I desperately need new recruits willing to read and type in CAPTCHAs for 20 hours and 3 cents per day.
Thank you, Google!
I'm a big tall mofo.
Will being able to communicate easily give people more ambition or will they hit 4chan first and decide that the rest of the world is a pit of evil that has to be avoided at all cost...
I'm still waiting for broadband here in the US. That last mile is a killer...
Sounds like someone decided on the name based on a conversation with accounting? "How much money would we have to dump into this to get into the African market?" "Oh... 3 Billion, at least!"
"but many other things must be in place before that can happen"
Sure. But satellites would be probably the most costly and the most steep step.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Marketing is great, innit?
"They cannot afford our product, so lets artificially accelerate their development until such point that they can, and then sell them out product"
Not that I, paying ZAR70 per gig for internet access, mind at all. Hell, bring it on - those monopolistic providers here in Africa, please, by all means, hand their asses to them.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
that money be better spend feeding the poor or even building up basic infrastructure like schools and wells
.. so now the Indian tech support companies that everyone have outsourced to can themselves outsource to some new African companies.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
*sigh* How much food and HIV care/prevention can you get for $750m? Priorities people! But then again there's no money to be made in that I suppose :(
The next move is to build a great city with a secret underground component. Call it "Raccoon City" perhaps.
But, hey, why not spend a few billion to get an African peasant farmer a 1 Meg connection?
We just spent $3 TRILLION on the Iraq war (not done yet) probably will spend another $1 TRILLION on Afghanistan and just bailed out of the housing industry for what will probably become a half TRILLION dollars.
Starts to add up to real money.
And I can only afford 1mpbs broadband.
So maybe they should help us.
and they could actuarially revolutionize life in the developing world.
Take all the data from the satellite, crunch it through Precision Agriculture systems to generate recommendations for crop care (and even crop selection), and then distribute the results over the broadband network, along with things like video tutorials for farming techniques.
Boing Boing has a post on the basics of precision agriculture here: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/09/agroveillance-using.html
http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/hexayurt/supercomputer-applications-for-the-developing-world-375
Was an approach to doing this based on repurposing military imagery.
Really could change the world in a big way, food security for all.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
suitable for people with low literacy?
Rule #34.. there's already porn of it .-)
bickerdyke
My 26.4 kbps (that's right, not quite 28.8 modem speeds) connection is right here in the good old USA.
Then why not protest and try to have this improved? If all you do is pay your bill and mutter on slashdot, they'll keep you on your current rate.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Things I anticipate doing once these 3 billion people are hooked up:
-Send the first goatse link
-Be the first to solicit cybersex
-and ask "a/s/l?"
-Degenerate various African languages into their equivalents of "AOLspeak."
-Accuse them of being teenage boys unless they "show pics"
-ATTN: Dear Sir/M, I am Mr. Johnathan Ashcroft. an Auditor of a BANK OF THE WASHINGTON, DC. (FCT). I have the courage to Crave indulgence for this important business believing that you will never let me down either now or in the future.
Stop whining and get a satellite connection. More than 50% of existing satellite Internet connections are in the 'developed world'. When this new satellite service is installed, you, too can benefit (you see, the satellites go all the way around the world) and they'll be happy to sell your ISP a connection.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Sadly, only WWII was more expensive, and we had an infrastructure as well as resources that could absorb that back then. It cracks me up when I see that wall street thinks that Bush was better than average, while many main stream historians are saying that he is down in the bottom 1/3.
You already have the option to purchase satellite internet access at $100/month.
> Stop whining and get a satellite connection.
You obviously have not actually used a satellite connection. The quality of service is abysmal and you'll be lucky if you can get speeds faster than dialup. Oh, and latency totally sucks. And it costs an enormous amount of money for what you get. Satellite companies have every incentive to cram as many users as possible onto their satellite(s), and so they do, with the result being speeds just fast enough to prevent their offices being razed by angry customers.
... like the United States?
... so, I guess we can expect to have a lot of widows on the internet who would like to find trustworthy people to help them launder their millions?
This low earth orbit satellite offers speeds up to 10 Gb/sec and latency of 100ms at a cost of only 5% of existing connections.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
A few precisions, as I actually know about some details of this. This system will be both better and worse than traditional satellite internet.
Better, the key point, is latency. The orbit of satellites is around 7,000 km, which means the ping time is limited to 200 ms (i.e. an EU/US ping time in optical fiber). This is the absolutely key selling point compared to other existing GEO satellites. Also they have massive capacity. On the spacecraft design side though this is a very bad idea because it's bang in the middle of the Van Allen belt. Also -going- there is a real hassle, one needs serious rockets.
Worse, because it's not GEO, so they need 5 satellites to cover the belt (as opposed to one, or three). The major issue is then that there are similar comms problems to satellite telephone, i.e. need to handle handover. So one dataport will need two sets of antennas and ground stations to talk to two satellites at the same time.
Finally, all the typical problems linked to satellite comms are still there, i.e. reliability, downtime during heavy rain (i.e. a whole season in those regions), expensive ground kit.
They quote 700 M$ for 16 sats, so that's 40 Megabucks each, quite cheap for that kind of kit when launch & development is included. The 2010 date is quite risible really for anybody who knows anything about satellites.
Finally, one has to be careful about the commercial case. There -is- infrastructure in Africa & other areas. The problem isn't so much lack of technology as abusive pricing by national telecom operators. I can't imagine they would allow a system like O3B to operate in their country without charging a license fee (like mobiles).
There's an article on ITweb comparing this to Microsoft's Teledesic, which actually sounds rather apt.
We'll see. BTW Am not an anonymous coward but rather a non-member of Slashdot.
please please!
Take all the data from the satellite, crunch it through Precision Agriculture systems to generate recommendations for crop care (and even crop selection), and then distribute the results over the broadband network, along with things like video tutorials for farming techniques.
Enter sudden civil war, fields get burned, wireless gets stolen and sold by criminals that already have internet, villagers raped and murdered. Welcome to central-Africa.
Wow that is some creative number crunching, you turn 3 billion people into six billion eyes to be sold to advertisers. Are africans related to cameleons and can focus their eyes on two different ads at the same time?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
We thought those spam messages from Nigeria were bad enough, now the whole African continent will be sending spam. Wonderful.
http://herbopen24hours.blogspot.com or http://tolietman.blogspot.com
Also, my boss had satellite for his remote beeper adventures. After 6 months, he kicked it to the curb as unacceptable. He's back on (admittedly much higher speed) 44 kbps dialup.
I, for one, welcome our new Microsoft 2.0 overlords.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Launching internet access in developing countries is bound to cause an echo generation of e-fraud.
Not to say that people in these countries shouldn't have it, but rather the conditions on which they should be simply given it under the condition that google also teaches them how to use it properly and that using it for fraudulent reasons will bring down the local religious deity upon their arse.
Wow that is some creative number crunching, you turn 3 billion people into six billion eyes to be sold to advertisers. Are africans related to cameleons and can focus their eyes on two different ads at the same time?
You see, the thing is, when I said Google will sell these eyeballs to advertisers. I meant that google will literally buy these people's eyeballs and sell them to advertising agencies to fry & eat, or whatever it is ad agencies do with their eyeballs.
So you see, my maths does make sense after all.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
They could use it, sure.
However, countries in Africa could really use a 4 billion dollar investment into Concentrated solar power.
4 billion is all that it would take to make the necessary power for the entire continent out of sun power, mirrors, and liquid salt and some high power lines.
Once you get past the corruption anyways.
No line-of-sight to the geo-stationary plane. (I'm on the north side of a mountain.)
How about we invest in broadband throughout America first? There are still plenty of smaller towns and rural areas that don't get to complain about how slow their 20mb cable connection is. All we have as options are terribly managed telephone lines which yield 24.6kbs at best, or if you're feeling lucky, you can hook up a laggy (and expensive) satellite.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
I'm just back home after three weeks in Lusaka, Zambia, where our vsat link running at 128kbps up, 384kbps down is costing us just over $2,000USD per month. Yes, geo sync sat latency is a pain, but we'd take affordable bandwidth whatever way we can get it. Against this kind of price gauging, people are still making it work (http://link.net.zm/?q=node/230), but there like everywhere else, early adoption is costly (http://link.net.zm/?q=node/217).
Good luck with those protests.
Luckily, a local consortium has promised wireless boradband within five years. Of course, I've heard that for the last 10 years.
SWEET! I'll have so many dead rich uncle's giving me money that I can share with the entire Slashdot community!
I have worked on some projects in South America to reach rural areas. Internet is normally the easy part, getting electricity to the remote place is the hard and expensive part. The only options are things like wind and solar, which are very expensive.
Living in Chile
Oh, that's right. That'd be NOBODY.
Thanks. Thanks a lot.
And infrastructure do. In fact big food handouts could kill national agriculture, fragile as it is, and make people worse off in between handouts. Of cause broadband will create some potential for outsourcing. That is a legitimate complain, but don't have the moral high ground to invoke.
If you can produce a product at 5% the cost of anyone else, and you maximize profit by providing it to the customer at 95% of the cost to buy from anyone else...
Of course, usually if you really can provide it at 5% of the cost, # of customers x $$$ profit per customer is higher for lower $$$ per customer. I'm just trying to point out that % discount to produce a product != % discount for a customer to buy the product.
... not 45. Big difference.
See the problem Google would face here is political.
If they invest in building better broadband in the United States they would have to go where told after awhile, if not upfront. Otherwise they would get vilified if here was offended or wanted to be offended.
It was like when high speed cable was being rolled out in my area, it HAD to go into certain neighborhoods, less than 10% uptake, before coming to mine because otherwise it would not have been "fair".
I am all for them going into countries like they provided they aren't paying some damn warlord to pad his wallet or sell out people for what they post.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I'm sure these African nations will rejoice having broadband access and $99 laptops (with Chrome, of course)
They can then be just like the rest of the civilized world! (well, you know, except for lack of clean drinking water, food shortages, sanitation problems, civil wars, and corrupt governments -- well, mebbe not the last)
Perhaps those people can "work from home in their spare time" as phone technical support or other and raise their standard of living.
The last thing we need is tech support being outsourced to yet ANOTHER country that knows even LESS about computers!
I don't think the issue here is bringing the Internet to all these people. As the summary notes, there's problems with power, literacy, etc. Plus, how much could Google actually make selling advertising to poor Africans? How much would advertisers be willing to pay to advertise to people that don't have much money with which to buy? No, the real goal here, IMO, is to set up an infrastructure that allows businesses to operate in the region, by making broadband available, and then sell broadband access to businesses who can set up shop there, get cheap and abundant labor, and have broadband access. Problems with literacy wouldn't be an issue, since only managers would need to access the Internet. And power issues wouldn't be that large, since they'd only need power lines to the places of business, not to individual homes. So here, I think, Google is looking to function as an ISP, rather than as an ad merchant.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Maybe this will help stop all the fighting. They just might take up first person shooters or start watching porn all day instead of arguing over who is the superior tribe (or whatever they're fighting about).
"Darfur holds first nationwide Call of Duty tournament."
[sarcasm]yeah, nothing but advertising and market share. I mean if they really wanted to make a difference, why don't they just target the causes of problems?[/sarcasm] seriously people... yes, google (or anyone for that matter) could pump this money into feeding people for a year or two, but after that, things would still be the same. Western civilisation has been giving aid for how long now? And how much difference has it made (apart from keeping people alive another day so they can suffer tomorrow instead)? I am all for help for the poor and needy, it - but I beg to differ on what constitutes REAL help. I used to think that we should just support poor countries as much as we can, but now I know that the only way any country will ever learn to stand on its own two feet is if (well meaning but ultimately flawed) handouts stop. The economic recovery of Germany after WW2 didn't occur because people just 'gave' Germany food and medical care. It occurred because under the Marshall plan, the US made long term investments into infrastructure and the economy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirtschaftswunder I'm not saying that google has no other motives than helping the needy, but neither did the US with post WW2 Germany. If they can make a buck while doing good, then good on 'em! Please people - read, and then think before you form an opinion!
lol
Now the impoverished masses can surf the web while they eat cake
Eubola, the HIV virus, and now this.
Traditional literacy is not a requirement for effective use of electronic communication, and as a bonus quickly learning an informal communication system (supplemented by verbal/visual content) is the best rapid learning curve in existence ( think of the scores of Pidgin languages that have and still do crop up for bartering over the centuries). On a wireless net using new low powered devices with solar and other locally available energy sources, this network can reach anyone anywhere. If this works out even filthy rich folks can use it for casual means and to keep in touch with everyone else while still having their exorbitant gadgets, etc. I think one of the problems with attempts to provide a laptop for all is not marketing them to everyone (the original buy two keep one and have one shipped to someone who can't buy one was the best model for shared communication and common ground, but it was dropped for simplistic pointless philosophical reasons and I suspect for serious market pressure from vested interests, someone correct me if I'm wrong, I wanted one and liked the idea of someone else getting one who needed it!) Real Human progress depends on those with more than sufficient marginal means setting aside about 20 percent of the Global marginal resources to build a minimal level of Human infrastructure that provide dignity and opportunity. The best way to insure that you don't starve is to build a society where no one is allowed to starve even if you occasionally have to eat hamburger. I applaud Google and I hope they eventually make money fairly for this foresight and imagination.
if only they could do something about the sorry state of broadband in the US. Mainly the lack of any real competition.
Forced bundling with a phone line, for a combined fee of $80/mo, with a two-year contract and a $300 early termination fee? No thank you.
Forced bundling of TV services? Maybe with a contract too? For a combined fee of $80/mo? No thank you.
Anywhere except in high-density cities, the monopoly incumbent telcos and cablecos have a virtual stranglehold on you, if you want anything other than dialup. And thats assuming you are lucky enough to have both as an option.
Obviously it's Google's responsibility to work for your welfare! How selfish and uncaring of them to think outside of helping people with the richest government of the world!
And it's not like your hospital can afford anything more than a 26.4 kbps connection! It's not like those millions of African (and Indian, and Bangladeshi ... ) peasant farmers really need any more help than they already have to get out of poverty!
Piss off you whining bloody American. If you stopped invading other countries, maybe you'd be able to afford to fix it.
You tell the rest of the world your the greatest nation on earth 50 times a day, how we should love your 'American business knowhow' them moan because a business makes a business decision that won't benefit you.
"Mummy, make them give it to meeee"
Go drive your SUV off a cliff.
Jerahmia Wright for President
God Damn American