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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."
I think he's talking about Canada.
"I think he's talking about Canada."
No, he's talking about the US, where cables are still nailed to wooden posts like in the days when Edison was still alive.
OK, but other people are working on those problems. Just because they have 1000 problems doesn't mean that everyone should drop everything and go into an entirely new field they're unfamiliar with to solve the problem that you deem to be the highest priority. This guy and his company have know-how, capital, employees, and hardware all invested in the process of building out Internet infrastructure. To scrap their existing plans and redirect their capital to medicine, plumbing or personal safety, would basically drain their capital, while accomplishing practically nothing.
Feel free to be an angel investor in companies or non-profits that are providing the things you think are high priority to the needy, but don't feel like you can tell other people what they should do with their money.
After all, you can make an argument that the Internet can be very useful for educating people with some of the ideas that might lead them to pursue a more civilized way of life. It also leads to 411 scams, but you have to take the bad with the good.
Why does it have to be an either-or? There are enough people in this country to pursue every progressive initiative we can imagine, and then some. It's just a matter of getting the right people with the right resources focused on the right tasks. Basically, it's a logistics and optimization problem; we have more than enough capability and more than enough resources to go around. It's mainly political and economic forces that make the system extremely resistant to positive change, no matter how obviously beneficial it might be.
Cell towers are not generally connected to each other for the primary backbone by radio. They may be connected by radio as a fault tolerant connection, or as an out-of-band means of management should the primary fiber backbone be interrupted, but radio is predominately used for the last-mile delivery, not for the backbone.
Did you read the part about trenching and putting in conduit? He wants to put in the necessary infrastructure to do it the right way.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
Internet is less expensive in the USA than in Canada. And even your monthly caps seem sane by comparison.
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.
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...).
Competition is overrated.
These are high barrier to entry markets. That kind of market ends up as an oligopoly.
To mitigate that, you need expensive and cumbersome regulation, which is very prone to corruption.
I live in Uruguay. There is a monopoly on landlines for the state telecom. Everybody gets reasonable good access, close to half the homes already have fiber.
We are a small country, but also a sparse one. It's doable elsewhere.
I think the problem here is that so many people see telecom as a market opportunity. To me, it's more like public roads, sewage, that kind of thing. At least when it comes to infrastructure, competition either won't happen, or won't do much good.
On wireless there's more space for markets, because barriers to entry are lower, but I would definitely have governments build all the land instrastructure and then lease. Of course governments are prone to corruption, but there is also the possibility of oversight, and each particular government does not last forever. Oligopolistic companies do last forever, and they have the same kind of problems.
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
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.