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A More Down-To-Earth Way To Bring the Internet To the Rest of the World
An anonymous reader writes: Elon Musk wants to bring the internet to less-developed countries using satellites. Facebook wants to use drones. Google's betting on balloons. These crazy high-tech solutions are interesting, but are they really needed? Mark Summer doesn't think so. His company focuses on building out internet infrastructure the old fashioned way: trenching pipes, raising cell towers, and getting local governments to lease what they've already installed. "A major problem in emerging countries is that when Internet access is available, it's often expensive. That's due in part to a lack of competition among providers ... While the costs of terrestrial Internet connections are high, they're relatively predictable. And the business model is proven around the world."
what's emerging? Antarctica?
Surely long-distance wireless is better over short-distance like your typical Wi-Fi setups.
I mean, yeah, it will be slower, and will take up a little more power, but the bands are most likely very free in a lot of places.
Most importantly, this will be considerably more accessible over a larger area, which is one of the problems with some places, long distances and uneven terrain which limits things considerably.
A combination of this and something like Google Balloon would be able to get much further than short-distance cell towers.
Some connection is better than no connection.
Just as long as it isn't 56k. Holy hell.
How about working on bringing these people clean water, steady food supplies, good public health standards, toilets, reduction of easily preventable disease, personal safety, freedom from constant fear of rape... shall we keep going? There's a thousand things more important than the internet to so many people.
A major problem in emerging countries is that when Internet access is available, it's often expensive. That's due in part to a lack of competition among providers
Good thing we don't have this problem in the developed world. /sarcasm
Maybe we could try bringing competition to this market in first world countries before trying to do so in developing and third world ones?
Modern users connect using apps.
needs the Internet, why?
"A major problem in emerging countries is that when Internet access is available, it's often expensive. That's due in part to a lack of competition among providers"
No, it's not a lack of competition. It's freaking expensive to build out new infrastructure. Companies aren't charities. They need a return on their investment otherwise they will go out of business.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Give me balloon, satellite or drone, and let my pay you directly. Right now all I have is 1M down, 300k up, for about US$30 a month. The problem is: about 90% of my city has at leas 10M down for cheaper. But since I live in a poor community there is no "need" to poll the last 1KM of cables, to build something for the demand. Who cares about a few hundred people with low income? Build cell towers? Again, why? To.. give internet for the poor? Who cares?? My hope was project baloon, or anything that I could pay for someone OUTSIDE brazil. Any in loco solution is bullshit, wont work in the real world.
sure, you could use balloons or crowdfunding but can we just stick to the tried and true scientific method. For example, Ive successfully distributed internet to several cities by strapping cellphones to squirrels with a roll of duct tape. Sometimes ill see them in trees (they do this to gain the best signal.) All youve gotta do is shout your http request to them, for example, "download the latest memes, squirrel!" simple really.
Another method ive tried for more remote locations, small rural towns, is to painstakingly construct a large trebuchet over a period of many months. Once complete, and loaded with a garbage bag full of laptops and cats, I launch the world wide web into the town to a cacophony of thankful citizens and excited felines no doubt working to eat a cheese burger or play an electric piano.
Good people go to bed earlier.
This is quite literally a "down-to-earth" solution when compared to balloons, drones and satellites.
Brazil's problems here are not technical and do not only extend to bringing the internet to the masses.
Netflix is one of the single largest chunks of bandwidth in many areas.
The root cause in developing countries for the high expense and lack of competition is corruption. Bribes are required to install any infrastructure, which adds to the cost. And those who control the infrastructure have no incentive to make it available at low cost, their pockets are already lined.
Dangit. They might just accomplish that by the time I've got my dark-matter well gravity controlled pulsar transponder system up and running with an IPN packet relayed to and from earth with only a 560 year latency.
Google, Facebook, or even Elon Industries know that. They aren't really trying to look cool while doing public service. They know the problem with a ground-based solution is neither lack of technology nor environmental. The problem is actually scale: when you start projects based on premises such as "universal", "ubiquitous", "unlimited" or "free/cheap", not even big companies can supply all of those due to obvious political reasons, such as those that bolster fair competition. Let's consider major gov'mt lobby poker Google, for instance - if they decided to extend their internet providing services to wireless in the US alone, they would pretty much have to spend billions to topple AT&T's (among others) influence on the administration. It would just make it too costly to actually provide the "free/cheap" service, and would probably imply restrictions to the other two as a trade-off, becoming effectively not "universal" nor "ubiquitous". They already have problems like that with Google Fiber (why are only some cities getting such a great service? You guessed right, existing cable company influence is blocking all newcomers on a political level), and wireless is just a much harsher market due to players being so well positioned. Now scale that to the entire world, with 200'ish countries to lobby. This goes without saying that quasi-orbital (and orbital) solutions such as balloons and satellites actually scale rather easily with minimal costs, even considering maintenance. Suffice to say, it is much easier to have this cool looking, bleeding edge solution that few will have the power to contest, due to universally acclaimed common good and obvious technological prowess (but eventually, stupid ways will be found for that, and stupid arguments will be made. Just look at Uber's case...).
So you're saying we shouldn't try new things? Drones and balloons both should be faster to implement. (after they get the first one to work)
Satellite works pretty much everywhere now it just doesn't have capacity or low latency, and it isn't economical to users compared to any other solution.
Drones and balloons (weather permitting) both have promise of low latency, better capacity and should be economical for the users when implemented over a large area.
Hardwired connections are great for low latency, high capacity and reliability.
But hardwired connections aren't economical over large sparsely populated areas unless easily accessible electrical infrastructure is already in place.
I think that anything other than a hardline is a poor long term solution.
Otherwise I am interested in seeing if balloons or drones can be made to work better than stationary wireless towers.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
That works OK but it's really better if you ship old AOL disks to squirrels, as there is a much greater supply of them than cellphones, plus they get some ridiculous number of hours to start with.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When you build out the physical infrastructure, you get ancillary benefits. Roads for example. If you are laying out cable, in an area without roads, you have to build a road. This may be more expensive, but everyone around benefits from that road.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The biggest benefit to using satellites would be to keep the infrastructure out of the hands of local warlords/bureaucrats/jackasses, who might trash it just to sell the metal for pennies. Or they might not like what it's being used for (spreading of information) and tear the towers down. Or threaten to tear it up unless they get paid.
This has been the tragic story, especially in much of Africa. Short-sighted corruption from local powers. The idea of infrastructure these dickweeds can't possibly get a hold of sounds pretty damn good to me.
"And the business model is proven around the world."
This is why he wants traditional methods. Control the wire, control the cost of the signal. using satellites, balloons, drones - they work with beams to a spot in the sky. who can control the beams? If someone other than the local bully . . . err telcom controls access to the 'net, their business model.
Give me the ability to walk around my local telcom to get an internet feed from someone who ONLY does internet (not a subsidiary of an integrated tv/telephone/broadcast media producer, distributor and internet provider) and I'll jump in an instance.
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
H..Who benefits by wired connections?
the two monopolists, of course
Why have nonsense claims about point-point wiring "superiority" save to protect the monopolies?
But this is Capitalism, never forget that.
And the whole POINT of Capitalism is establishing and protecting monopolists
otherwise the dynastic inheritance based wealth class might find their gains shrinking.
(When internet access is available), it's often expensive. That's due in part to a lack of competition among providers - sounds familiar!
We need to at least ensure that Comcast does not get any exclusive arrangements with government to build infrastructure, so that competitors that want to try are able to.
In most first world countries, no one ever digs up your lines or breaks into your relay facilities to steal the copper. Armed gangs don't demand bribes for building or digging on their turf. Local officials aren't constantly hassling you for kickbacks and no-show jobs for their friends. Your workers don't get robbed when they try to perform maintenance alone. Those are just SOME of the problems with building infrastructure in the third world.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
You lay cable/put up a cell tower in Africa, next morning it gets sold for scrap.
You lay fiber optic cable, they dig it up for the copper. You relay fiber optic cable..they dig it up for the copper again. It doesn't really matter that there is none.
And none of these guys seem to have heard of Village Telco and the mesh potato... huh.
Just run a wire from one house to anothe,r hook it up to one of these and plug a phone in. eventually someone plugs in a connection to the internet, and ALL of them have internet.
What wire? what do you got? Works with twisted pair, ethernet, coax, and even wireless a bit.
http://villagetelco.org/mesh-p...
Out here in rural California, virtually all the counties on the Eastern edge of the state have limited (6 Mbps) or non-existant (70% of El Dorado County, where I live) Internet service. While I laud your plan to provide service in parts of the world not served at all, wouldn't it make sense to make sure that all United States citizens have service first?
Our schools have little or no broadband. Our farmers and merchants have little or no broadband. Our local businesses can't expand markets. We have a situation where many rural residents travel 5-30 miles to cities (e.g., Folsom, or the County Seat, Placerville) to sit in coffee shops by the hour to share access to a slow WiFi connection (sure, the Airport is fast, but all customers are using the single 6 Mbps connection that Awful Terrible & Treacherous deems adequate for those "stupid farmers" (a quote from an AT&T executive I once tried to engaged on the subject; his solution: "Move the big Cities!").
For a lot of the 3rd world countries, you'd make more social progress keeping the infrastructure out of the corrupt hands of the thugs running those countries. Balloons at 90,000 ft would be out of reach militarily for most of these places.
A lot of places can't even get common sewers together because of corruption - internet infrastructure is a non-starter. Rulers control information to control power - they have no interest in an internet educated computer literate populace.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
In 5 years I want my Tesla, solar panels and Musk Gigabit Internet.. The guy sure knows how to put dreams in your head.
Screw the third world, I want Google to break the cruise ship internet cartel. The third world can benefit as an added bonus, but I want Google high speed internet halfway across the Atlantic ocean. Wired internet isn't going to accomplish that. :p