Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
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.