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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."
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.
Rough terrain is an issue in some areas but most developing areas also have cheap labor and would probably love the extra jobs that laying wire
and/or installing poles would require. Many of the poles in the USA were originally installed in holes dug by hand or dug with a stick of dynamite.
As far as google balloon, it seems like someone looking for something fun not something practical. The microwave towers they use to send signals
from newyork to chicago would seem like an ideal technology to use to get from town to town in remote areas and then long distance point to point broadcast
once you get to the town. My hometown used standard 802.11 on top of water towers. Anyone who had line of sight of the water tower could point an antenna
at it and it had about a 5 mile range which would be more than enough for most small towns in remote regions.