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The Go-Anywhere Cyber Cafe In a Shipping Container
nk497 writes "UK IT charity Computer AID has come up with a clever idea to use shipping containers to house thin-client-based, solar-powered cyber cafes, which can be used to bring connectivity to rural communities in Africa. The £20,000 boxes use a single Pentium 4 PC split out using thin client devices to offer computing to 10 people via local wireless access or mobile broadband. The solar power created from a single panel is enough to power the PC, 10 monitors, lighting, and also to charge mobile phones. Computer Aid founder Tony Roberts notes, 'The power of this idea is that we can drop that container anywhere in the world, literally in the middle of the Sahara desert.'"
20 grand?! Must be some pricey solar panels... Containers aren't that expensive...
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
A Pentium 4 powering ten web browsers? I hope everyone doesn't go to YouTube at once.
They should have went with a more power efficient (and faster) core 2 duo. It's not like the cost difference would have been noticeable given the cost of the shipping container, solar panels, etc.
They make everything in convenient container sizes now:
- servers
- internet cafes
- anti-ship missiles
- nuclear reactors
- nuclear bombs
Shipping containers are the "in" thing to do nowadays.
Many modern cpus are twice as fast for the same power draw.
telling me i have won the lottery and have been randomly
selected by the bank of Africa who want to send me 50million dollars (they only want 2% commission)
why not use amd?? more cores at less power then intel.
and a P4 with HT? Dual core? doing 10 VM like systems?
How much ram does it have 256? 512? 1g 2g 4g?
Gonna get a little hot in there, especially in the sun.
The £20,000 cost probably comes from Microsoft charging them for 10 licences for the 10 monitors.
Cool idea..but great, that's all we need is more scammers.
Dropping this container in the middle of Africa is a good way to establish a new cargo cult.
Seriously, though - why are these people so intent on providing Internet access to countries and people that need many more basic things in life first (including proper hygiene, medical care, food, clothing, development of civic society, business, infrastructure, etc etc). Providing internet without these other things results in proliferation of "Nigerian scams" and very little else.
A new shipping container might run $5000. But then you have to finish the insides. I could see $20k, especially with insulation.
But dropping it into the Sahara desert? Sure, you could drop it there but then everybody inside would die.
Lets go haul a big empty shipping container around for giggles? This thing looks like it could be condensed down to 11 netbooks and the solar panels to power them, figure 4k for the lot vs 20k for this. Aside from the solar panels your talking about 20kg of netbooks than can be stored at night and carried by a single man to the destination on his back. Want something permanent get the locals to build something or reuse an existing building. This just seems like a me to me to see we have shipping container stuff isn't it cool.
No sir I dont like it.
More 419 spams.
They are taking an expensive container unit, and a very expensive solar array, and buying ten thin clients, and the main computer is a Pentium 4?
That's just crazy. All I can think is that they are a computer recycling outfit, and they had a Pentium 4 on hand and just said "Eh, good enough."
I would have spent a few hundred and gotten an AMD dual-core or even quad-core chip and some ECC RAM. And probably a flash boot drive. You want the computer to be as bulletproof as possible, and it would be nice if it was energy-efficient. A Pentium 4 is basically a device for heating a small room... in other words, not power-efficient. It has a single core. I don't believe any Pentium 4 chipset supports ECC RAM. (Hence the AMD suggestion. Yes, I am an AMD fan, but Intel reserves ECC as a feature of only their expensive server chipsets; whereas ECC has been a standard feature with AMD for years now.)
If you are sharing one computer among ten users, extra cores would be a very good thing. Large cache would be a very good thing. Both of those argue for a modern CPU.
The article didn't say what the OS is. However, the article has a link to another article about the first such cyber cafe, and that previous article says they are using NComputing thin client technology. NComputing appears to be a solution for hooking up external thin clients to virtual machine images running on a host. Which begs the question: ten virtual machine images running on a Pentium 4?!? Let's hope they are least are using one of the models of Pentium 4 that supports the Intel virtualization "VT-x" instructions.
Oh well, I'm sure it works, and it's a heck of a lot better than nothing.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
OK, so lets put a metal shipping container (i.e. a big metal box) out in the desert and have people sit in there throughout the day - won't that get awfully hot?!?
I print, therefore I am.
Maybe one solar panel can run a PC and ten monitors, but how do you power the Cappuccino maker?
Three Squirrels
... by throwing a fishing pole into his face.
Basically, this is yet another fruit from the tree of philosophy of "if only Africanians had the KNOWLEDGE they would fix all their problems by themselves".
Like the missing infrastructure - they would learn how to build roads and how to grow crops using only their hands by reading wikipedia.
And maybe playing Civilization. And Farmville. Clean water would be provided from similar sources.
Also, they would use the internet to study medicine and become doctors.
In their spare time, between building roads, feeding themselves and getting their medical degree, they would figure out that whole economy shtick and kick ou.. no BUY OUT the foreign industries that keep exploiting them and their countries' natural resources.
They would also inherently gravitate towards a free democratic society.
Schools and hospitals and (clean industry) factories would simply pop-up everywhere when enough people learn enough things.
There would be no corrupt politicians, no criminals, no dictatorships or interracial hatred or conflict.
Really... All these people need to pull the Utopia up from the sand by its umm... cables?.. is The Internet.
Then they would have the same wonderful system that all the remaining people in the world have - only better, cause they would have it "ready-made".
No need for pesky experimentation and all those nasty revolutions when you have all the knowledge of the world at your fingertips.
Right?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Yay! here comes the computing power, it about time we had access to computing power any where on such short notice.Now I can logon to the information superhighway at work, or at home , or when I just out on the town!
Computing power anywhere...What a wonderful age we live in!
How in the hell will this alleviate poverty?
Let's take Nigeria for example.
I KNOW FOR A FACT that they've got both Internet AND a working postal system there. I've seen the evidence.
How will the "Internet in a box" magically alleviate poverty there? You can't just have the whole country running 419 scams.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Ok guys were are gonna take all these shipping containers and outfit them with server racks and air conditioners and people will pay use big us big money to use computers in a .... shipping container.
Summary:
1. Put computer in shipping container
2. ???
3. Profit.
Didnt Sun already do this???
half-arsed idea!
Beside the heat issue, they did not even consider the internet connection itself. For this thing to make any sense they should equip it with a satellite link...
Yes, the box itself can work in the middle of the Sahara, but how much is a satellite link and the ground equipment for it going to cost? I'm guessing it doesn't provide enough power to run that as well as the unit itself. So, you probably also need a power source for the ground station.
It might be more usefull in a village with no power, but close in to a city with wireless connectivity that could be accessed with a good directional antenna.
If you've already got a place with a hard wired connection or a ground station, then the PC's and power source are likely already available.
I'm impressed, and their mockup picture looks a sight cleaner than some of the filthy places I've been in, in Ireland!
You can't sell a donation that easily.
Sure, maybe you could make it tax deductible but it is not the same as someone actually paying you or your friends £20,000 for an "Boxfull of Internet".
Someone, somewhere has to pay for those components - even if Zambians and Kenyans get it completely free and if the labor and transport are also donated.
Donations to developing countries are a great resource if you want to launder some money.
Get your own charity and make a anonymous donation or two with that "pharmaceutical" money you have under the mattress.
Then, have your charity buy the necessities for the developing nations with that money from your other company, ship them via your shipping company and distribute them to the people in need.
And there you have it. Clean money and maybe even a laundered conscience.
Plus you get to call yourself a philanthropist.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
How about, the entire human genome that runs your sorry ass excuse for a self?
Or are you one of the young earth creationists that thinks humanity romped with the dinosaurs, and didn't develop in Africa?
We see the advantages, but there are some disadvantage, too.
Eg, in Australia, where any Aboriginal communities still without a "TeleCentre" (as Internet cafes are known in AU's Outback) need jobs for local community members, as well as access to the Internet:
Dropping in a "complete" system that provides Internet "kills" such jobs - eg:
1. refurbishing a "transportable" office module to serve as home for a Telecentre,
2. painting the refurbished module with local art, colors, etc., &
3. installing satellite Internet systems, suited to [possibly more cost-effective] local Internet services.
For many the thought of rectangular forms (eg, container) is not culturally apropriate,
so even a container may be the wrong structure to use in Outback Australia.
Newer architectures are beginning to explore round shapes in housing, offices,
clinics, etc. Telecentres will sooner or later be located within such structures, &
- before they are so integrated - they may need to fit into the larger community's
building style.
We suggest asking the community what they might prefer & maybe just send-in
sets of computer & Internet comms equipment, with options like community
WiFi.
In fact, low-cost mesh-networks for distributing Internet to homes might both:
1. encourage people to have computers in the home, &
2, give people an affordable means of having a VoIP phone service in the home.
(Many Aboriginal people, who live on Outback communities feel they must
rely on an open-air public phone - ie, when it works - saving the Au$21 / mon
minimum line fees charged by de facto monopoly telco Telstra. There was
ONCE a cost-free incoming phone service "InContact" available for such
homes, but Telstra has stopped providing it... leaving many Outback
communities' members dependent on a few public phones.)
It could inly take WiFi access points & VoIP ATA's (at each home wanting
its own phone, ie, if it's with in VoIP-quality range of [proposed] community
TeleCentre's WiFi connections.
Call me strange, but I suspect they'd prefer it if you dropped a container full of food, or clothes, perhaps farming equipment and seeds.
I worked for an NGO in Cambodia (http://www.kapekh.org) that implemented a similar program with thin clients powered by solar panels, but without the cargo container.
The program saw these thin clients installed within high school computer rooms, and had the simple goal of teaching office skills to impoverished high school children. Prior, we had a dozen or so standard computer labs that had endless issues with maintenance, misuse (video games, vcds, etc) and the expense of electricity. Thin clients ended up being way easier all around. Prior to getting USAID funding, we were sourcing them directly from a Chinese vendor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7OYQzv75Pk - A video of one of our first labs being opened and an overview of the idea. I believe there are about 20 of these labs now.
One of the issues we found with solar panels and the battery banks was the misuse of electricity perceived as "free". Charging mobile phones using high-end solar panel batteries was an issue, especially when our networking equipment was unplugged to allow for more charging devices.
I can't, for the life of me, imagine why Africa needs cyber cafes. In all seriousness ... there aren't internet cafes in rural Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Utah or Idaho - places I drive through or hike in. Do those folks want internet cafes? Can you order something from Amazon and have it delivered there? If they go to news sites all they see is how bad their continent is compared to the rest of the world, at least if the BBC, Reuters, CNN, etc ... have anything to say on that.
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
What you mean they have no internet in Africa? Well, why don't we just put some in a box and send it to them?
Um...sir. I don't think that's how the internet works.
Just do it, Goddammit!
Internet access helps alleviate poverty in the same way that cell phones: by removing intermediaries and giving farmers access to up-to-date pricing information and buyers.
This is what that "internet access" (which was actually a broker and micro-loan program) did:
http://www.idrc.ca/en/ev-122219-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5877.html
The epilogue to this project is not good. One year after the follow-up data were
collected, the exporter refused to continue buying the crops from DrumNet farmers since
none of the SHGs had obtained EurepGap certification. DrumNet lost money on its loan
to the farmers and collapsed, but equally importantly farmers were forced to sell to
middlemen, sometimes leaving a harvest to rot. As reported to us by DrumNet, the
farmers were outraged but powerless, and subsequently returned to growing what they
had been growing before (e.g., local crops such as maize).
As for the "cell phones" link, you don't have to go farther than the article itself:
Most of these unconnected masses live in rural areas that are much poorer and more remote than Muruguru.
Now cell-phone makers and service providers understand that they can make money by bringing cell-phone service within reach of people who live on $2 a day.
Users buy new phones for as little as $20--and secondhand models for far less--as well as airtime in increments of just 75 cents in Kenya, enough for nearly 10 minutes of off-peak calling.
.
They increased their profits by an average of 8% after they began using mobile phones to find out which coastal marketplaces were offering the best prices for sardines. Yet consumer prices for fish dropped 4% because the fishermen no longer had to throw away the catch they couldn't sell when they sailed into a port after all the buyers had left.
"That's what economic efficiencies are about--everyone is better off," says Jensen.
It is simply wonderful seeing such selective blindness.
A mobile phone costs as little as 1000% of your daily costs.
10 minutes (charged by a minute, so that is less than 10 calls) of mobile-credit costs you 37.5% of your daily costs.
And to even that out, your income has increased by 8%.
So, on average, that one 10-minute charge eats up that 8% increase in profit five out of seven days a weak.
But all is not so dark and dreary - if they work 7 days a weak, they will earn 0.32$ of extra profit each weak.
That way, they get to pay off that 20$ phone of theirs in only 1.2 years. Not accounting for interests.
After that - the sky is the limit!
Sure. For some people in developing nations mobile phones are providing A phone for the first time.
For some even a way of long distance communication of any kind for the first time.
And there are bound to be benefits from that as well as some measurable increases of quality of life.
But attaching the "it alleviates poverty" label on the mobile phone is way off the target.
Only people whose poverty is alleviated are mobile-phone merchants and local telecommunication companies (that practice the best kinds of monopolies - uncontrolled and rampant).
For a "regular Joe" they are more of a resource drain than a "poverty alleviation".
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Does anyone who has real experience administrating an NComputing environment care to weigh in on the usability and sustainability? Other than horsepower limitations, I've heard that they frequently react poorly to patching the base Windows environment.
We have some resource-restricted K-12 environments looking at this, as well as Microsoft's Windows MultiPoint Server 2010 to save money on workstations and power infrastructure. Fair warning, the Microsoft site seems practically devoid of substantial implementation detail and is more geared toward the kind of fluffy K-12 marketing that makes school administrators spend your tax dollars. I think it's somehow using USB keyboards, mice and monitors -- but I haven't been able to tell.
These technologies seem to be under consideration in place of, say, a "nettop" (atom-based) lab running workstation management for ease of administration, and possibly one of the many teacher-snoop-and-control software applications for managing their use. Given state testing requirements, most of our region uses Windows or Macs for compatibility with their testing software. The Macs are generally too expensive for regular purchase cycles, but it's apparently easier to find grants for them as opposed to PCs.
SUN had that for years - and it didn't cost 20K and it was not limited to 10 clients either.
Hallowed are the Ori
I don't know about this. Ten native villagers whacking off at the same time to their first Internet porn in a hot shipping container in the desert... ...why spend £20,000 for that... ...unless maybe the company has a live feed into the trailer and also runs a porn website proclaiming, "See real African natives whacking off together!"
At about $3,000 per person, that's the most expensive internet I've ever heard of!
Shortly after New Orleans flooded I had an idea to create a set of emergency response trains with containers fitted for living and all necessary emergency response supplies. Two or three such trains could be parked in Kansas / Missouri area and be able to reach any part of North America in 24 hours. One such train could provide housing for several hundred families with supplies and power that would last weeks. I don't even need credit - mostly I just want to see it happen because I think it would be cool.
You could then use the same type containers on ships to provide housing for areas that have recently been struck by typhoon or other such ocean based atrocity.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
There are a lot of people to cure or help and no money to cure them with. Hence it's much more important to invest in wealth creation than charity.
I've seen your proposed way of doing things and it didn't work well for us:
A Zimbabwean.
This is all just my personal opinion.
OK, here's what I see - a shipping container with a PC shared among 10 users, 10 desks, flat panels, and a WiFi access point. It is powered by an array of solar panels. Sounds lovely, but a few observations:
- I'd like to see a power comparison between latest Atom MBs netbooting off a server (like the Intel D510MO with new low power chipset) and this thin computing solution. Those particular Intel MBs are about $90/ea retail with lower-cost units available, including boards that can be run off 12VDC.
- It's great that this "solution" doesn't require mains power, but it oddly requires a hard-wired Internet connection - how many places in developing nations have a stable internet connection but no power (the obvious "market" for this "solution".)
- I find it hard to believe that this solar panel array could support all these workstations AND a satellite uplink (ruling out the mid-Sahara installation).
- Other posters asked about A/C - I don't think you can run the 10 terminals and a PC and an uplink device as well as an A/C unit... I think vents, fans, and filters are what are called for here.
- Part of the real, unspoken, value is the security of a steel container that can be locked up when not in use - a $20K "jewel" in the midst of extreme poverty would likely prove very tempting to criminals.
Once you get past the novelty, I think this is an under-powered solution to not really too-pressing problem in many developing countries. Twenty thousand dollars can go a long way, solving a lot of problems in developing countries that are far more pressing than ensuring everyone can pay for access to wikipedia (the article talks about revenue streams, like charging folks to recharge their cellphones)...
But, it did look nice inside, but it could use more sunlight IMHO, one 18" square window is too small.
Ken
Absolutely - this container has everything you need, just add "internet access" and it can provide, uhm, internet access! Sounds a bit like freeze-dried water - just add water!
As I read the article, it seems to be supplying a start-up business with multiple revenue streams (charge for internet access from the thin clients, charge for phone charging, charge for WiFi hotspot access, etc), NOT dropping free internet access in the remote parts of the world.
Ken
Shipping containers are easy to secure in transit; thievery is rampant in transit through some places.
Shipping containers are easy to secure at closing time; there's human beings involved, and therefore a five-percenter will appear who will steal anything.
Shipping containers can be power-sawed into a structure which opens up easily yet closed for security at closedown.
A tent-fly can be suspended above the metal to deflect sunshine and keep much heat from collecting.
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
They just have to close the door and ship the container to protect the king against rebels and save his heritage.
"Spam by container"
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Well said. Considering the widespread belief that raping a virgin girl will cure a man of AIDS, I believe we have more basic issues to resolve.
But getting rid poorer country of AIDS would require, among other, access to information. To help fight popular belief and misconception.
Similarly, lots of other urgent immediate problems can benefit from better access to information.
Ergo : a ready-to-use cyber-cafe/container *CAN* be useful in a developing nation.
What people have to realise is that access to information is always crucial. Traditionally, that has meant good schools and libraries. But now on-line access is also starting to play an important role.
And thus, internet access is slowly becoming a fundamental necessity, the same way as water, electricity, etc.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]