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SolarNetOne Wants Stable Internet Connections For Developing Nations
There are many initiatives to bring tech to developing areas of the globe; things like OLPC, Geekcorps, and UN programs. One new approach from SolarNetOne strives to allow users in those developing areas to have access to an internet connection without having to depend on unreliable infrastructure. "Each SolarNetOne kit is a self-powered communications network. Energy is produced from a solar array sized to each locale's latitude and predominant weather conditions. The generated power is stored in a substantial battery array, and circuit breakers and electronics protect the gear from overloads and other perturbations. A basic kit includes five 'seats,' implemented as thin clients connected through a LAN to a central server. The networking gear also includes a long-range, omnidirectional WiFi access point, and a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) device. Each kit also includes all the cables and wires required to assemble the system, so few additional materials are required for an installation."
Think of it this way, before 2000, or so, most people in the developed countries were not connected to the internet either. But that did not prevent us from attaining a high level of education, standard of living, etc. We landed a man on the moon with most engineers still using slide rules!
So I'm not buying it that the life of the average African would be substantially improved by their ability to download videos from YouTube. The article uses the example of Rwanda, that only 1% of the population can connect to the internet. OK, that is very low, I admit. But maybe decades of genocidal tribal warfare might also be a factor here, and addressing the root causes might a higher priority than the ability to set up a Facebook page.
I think it comes down to the basics: pubic safety, rule of law, market structures, literacy, infrastructure, etc. A connection to the internet can certainly help, in some cases. But in no way is it a necessity. Lower tech solutions may be more robust and effective, e.g., long distance shortwave radios, packet radio BBS's, etc.
Reliable? They should beam it from space. Duh.
I was just wondering how this system would work inside a nation or region that is actively trying to censor internet access or jam any "illegal networks"; or if it is possible to create a system from this concept that would work in such nations.
The Long Now Foundation
That way, you'll have the most stable and reliable connection imaginable.
"The Y chromosome is genetic. The odds are very good that if you are male then your father was too." -Internet Commenter
It seems like this should be a lower priority in developing nations. Not to make light of the situations in third world countries, but when your posting on FB that your mood is constantly 'hungry' or 'sick', something is wrong.
"You can't really dust for vomit" --Nigel Tufnel
Well I want a 12 inch pecker, a billion dollars, my own island nation, and immortality. After that you can have your damn internet connection.
after all we gave them access to the worlds opportunities on an equal footing and the best thing they can do with it is try and scam people, setup a shop ? nahh, sell products and services that people want at western prices ? nahh.
it seems getting Africa online has brought nothing but hoards of spam and scammers.
In our company we deny access to all of Afrinet because of the trouble we have their citizens, its just not worth the bother.
Shame really, they could of started the next Amazon or Ebay (the web is a level playing field after all)
Now I just need a trailer to tow this baby along on our next family "camping" trip. God I love the great outdo.... wait! someone is wrong on the Internet! Kids your going to have to go hiking on your own.
...but only if you can figure out a way to download food, clean water, and medicine.
I'm not certain that internet access is the best way to help developing nations, when so many more basic necessities are lacking. You can't download political stability, either - and many basic supplies are hijacked before reaching those most in need. You can't fix that with a laptop.
Never underestimate the potential of Human stupidity. -Heinlein
I'm definitely in favor of pubic safety, as you said. I should be the only person allowed to take a razor to my crotch.
The U.S. has nearly broken the bank, fighting for freedom by, well, fighting.
Even in 2001, some technical people felt the better way to promote freedom would be to work to establish communications in countries that are now beset with violence and poverty and totalitarian control by oppressive governments (none of these three problems necessarily being related, mind you).
There exist problems with doing this. One is addressed by this idea, how do you even make computers work where the utilities and support are unreliable if not non-existent. But the advantage of this is limited if you don't deal with a second problem: How you link people into the internet in a way that denies oppressors and/or conflicts from breaking these connections (as Iran has attempted to do lately)?
Then of course, there is the problem of actually doing something. How do you get governments/people/companies to invest in the tiny costs (when compared to fighting in Iraq and elsewhere) of deploying such technology in places where it would be needed. The U.S. and its government is much more interested in dropping million dollar bombs to blow up stuff, than dropping a few bills in a way that would actually have leverage with the people of this world, and that would actually be appreciated.
Bombs and war are disruptive and prevent people from both hearing the ideas about peace and tolerance and telling their own ideas and stories to the world. We need a technology that both gives people a voice no matter what their circumstances, and the ability to join the dialog about such problems even if the power doesn't run all the time.
I hope people take such ideas seriously, and actually do something other than just sell these systems to rich people that like mountain cabins.
"While I agree with you, there are also some things to be gained from having access to the internet. For example how many people would care about the situation in Iran if Iran had no internet?"
They'd care even less if cell-phones didn't come with cameras.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Let's say that you get these people online. They certainly won't be using the Internet in any manner remotely similar to how we use it. Consider the following:
1. Very few resources will be in their native language. This means that very few people in these countries can use it to learn more effective agricultural practices, learn how to obtain safe drinking water, or learn how the reduce the spread of disease. (Not to mention the millions of other things that we have access to with a keyword search.) A few people will be able to do this because they will have a second language that is used online, and will use it because they want to figure out how to solve local problems. Thing is, those are the people who would have sought out resources anyways.
2. Very few websites are designed for low bandwidth and low reliability connections. I work in a town with a satellite connection to the internet. Minimum latency on that is 0.25 seconds to go from the Earth to the satellite and back. Furthermore, satellite is expensive so bandwidth is limited. (A thousand people are served by less bandwidth than the typical Slashdotter has going into their home.) You would be surprised at how much stuff breaks (e.g. timeouts on either the client or server end) and how ploddingly slow stuff is. And that is using a relatively good connection to the outside world. Even if none of their infrastructure used satellites for any portion of the network, they would still have to deal with high latency due to most of the world's online resources being concentrated in developed nations.
Both of these issues (and a few others) means that the people who use communications technologies in the developing world will be primarily concerned with local communications. At which point you may as well ditch IP and use something that is more appropriate to their needs.
Projects like this are part of "all of the above", part of getting food, clean water and medicine. The things needed to help people's and nations get to be better. I see a lot of comments about how useless this would be. On the contrary, given a village access to the net means they can learn about new ways to make indigenous water filters using cheap available resources. They can find out about newer methods of farming/sustainable agriculture. Look for new markets for their goods, or sources for cheaper goods they might need, tools, seeds etc. The access to just a lot of books and papers could help, from the schoolkids to the local overwhelmed medical person. It's not just one or the other that is needed in a lot of these places, it is all of it, all of the above. Civilization.
Some orgs concentrate on medicines/vaccines, others on food aid, others on..whatever. This is just another way to help, and to do it cheaper, to leapfrog the old model of very expensive centralized wired infrastructure for both power and communications, and go directly to decentralized models that are faster/cheaper and easier to deploy.
And socially, once people start to realize there is more than just the local tribe and the surrounding few square miles and whatever the local warlord or shaman dictates to them, beyond the abstract, with just a narrow and skewed jingoistic viewpoint, they can start to see we all need to get along better, because we are all human and have to share this planet, that we have more in common than what they might have been brainwashed into believing previously.
In other words, with less viewpoints being available, remaining insular and cutoff, it is easier for the local warlords and power goons to keep their populations controlled and under their thumb and doing nutso stuff. Once they see there are other ways to "think and do", at least it gets them considering saner and more rational alternatives.
We see it daily, look around at the headlines, dictatorship/regime X, the first thing they try to do if it looks like their rule might be threatened is they cut off and restrict and censor communications. This is *precisely* why we should encourage more widespread and open and free-er communications, *especially* in areas that have a rather severe lack of them to begin with.
I want stable internet and I live in a developed nation!
Comcast business = crap
- The net often goes down 6+ times a day.
- When the net doesn't go down the cable modem seems to run out of memory for its routing table so random websites will stop loading. Rebooting the mobem will fix this. Slashdot's IP was one a while back and I thought Comcast was just blocking /. I had to go to http://star.slashdot.com/ to read anything.
- Field techs have been out here countless times and are as dumb as a sack of bricks. We have the cell number of one that seems to know what he's doing.
Problem still not fixed 2 months later.
I think a cell phone network and donated refurbished cell phones would have a bigger and better impact
The gun is good - Zardoz
Much as I hate to be greedy, any chance we could accomplish this in the US of A?
I have been working the IT related fields in Latin America for over 10 years, both rural and urban. I have also spent some time teaching in China.
One problem I see with this article is that it makes no mention of how they get the internet connectivity. Is it sat? Is it connecting to an existing upstream provider? Both are often unrealistic is developing countries even inside urban areas because of reliability issues, corruption, cost, monopolies, and so on. In rural areas there simply are not options, and because of low population with limited economic resources it is too expensive to provide it.
The other problem that is an even greater issue is when the dam thing breaks, there are very very few people to maintain them. If someone has sufficient know how to fix something like this, chances are they are working for someone that pays a lot more (in local terms) because there is high demand for very few qualified IT people. Again, in rural areas they are often none existent. Anyone with those sorts of skills leaves. I have run in to this problem, even when money was no issue. There simply is no one to provide the support.
Living in Chile
I go chop your dollar
I don suffer no be small
Upon say I get sense
Poverty no good at all, no
Na im make I join this business
419 no be thief, its just a game
Everybody dey play am
if anybody fall mugu, ha! my brother I go chop am
Chorus
National Airport na me get am
National Stadium na me build am
President na my sister brother
You be the mugu, I be the master
Oyinbo I go chop your dollar, I go take your money dissapear
419 is just a game, you are the loser I am the winner
The refinery na me get am,
The contract, na you I go give am
But you go pay me small money make I bring am
you be the mugu, I be the master⦠na me be the master ooo!!!!
When Oyinbo play wayo, them go say na new style
When country man do im own, them go de shout bring am, kill am, die!
Oyinbo people greedy, I say them greedy
I don see them tire thats why when them fall enter my trap o!
I dey show them fire
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
You said shortwave, but I'm changing it slightly to HF.
The organization for which I normally work has policies about this kind of thing and almost all of our vehicles, without exception, are equipped with HF. The problem is, they don't work all the time, either. The vagaries of atmospheric conditions, time of day, blah blah blah and the skip zone, it's usually just as efficient to call on the phone instead of screwing around on the radio for half an hour. Because let's face it, even in Africa, if there's a large number of people there, someone's set up a cell tower.
For the past two years, I've carried my iPhone into several African countries and I tend to work pretty far from civilization. The GPS on the 3G was worth the full price of the iPhone alone. I'm about to get the GS for no other reason than the compass. Oh, and I tether, too. Usually hell of a lot cheaper if I can get a connection than what we get charged for data over a Thuraya or BGAN.
all by itself it mights not seem like much but if that selfsustainable minilan were deployed in a school, or an other education center, or a hospital, than it would make a significant difference.