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Facebook Lays Out Blueprint For Connecting Hard-To-Reach Rural Areas (cnet.com)
Samantha Rhodes, writing for CNET: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took another step in his pet project to bring internet access to every corner of the planet. Facebook on Wednesday unveiled a platform that will give barebones connectivity to far-flung rural communities, called OpenCellular. The social-networking company will provide the skeleton for what you would need to bring cellular access, complete with open-source software that lets potential partners update and tweak the service to meet a community's needs. OpenCellular marks Facebook's latest attempt to push its goal of worldwide access, which aims to connect the last four billion people without internet access and the 10 percent of the population without cellular service. It's a priority for Facebook and Zuckerberg, even if not everyone agrees with their methods. Rather than go at it alone, this new program will rely on partners to run with the blueprints that it has drawn up.
To be able to Snoop on people. Everything boils down to this!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
If we make an average of a dollar a month, that's almost fifty billion a year.
I would like to see an OpenCellular network spring up for those of us already connected, but connected through giant monopolistic profit centers.
Since these existing ISPs aren't really serving the needs of my community - shouldn't we have the ability to replace them?
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
It's only access into Facebook's walled garden where they can harvest your data, tell you how you should vote, etc.
so that it works better on dial-up before spending huge amounts of money on infrastructure. I live in Seattle so dial-up is the fastest option in my building, and it usually takes me half a dozen tries just to get the Facebook page to load. If people on OpenCellular can't even load facebook.com, what good will it be?
Your comment makes you sound like someone who would complain about doctors who are administering vaccines in third-world countries instead of setting up shop in your community to provide more competition for your already pretty-good health care providers....
lets potential partners update and tweak the service to meet a community's needs.
Right, a $100K/yr sysadmin going to want to live at these places to help tweak network bandwidth? Cause with open source, you'll going to need one. Sure, there are smart kids in these rural areas, but you still need a higher education experience to work with open source.
Think about it. When AOL came out and got a lot of people online, most of them thought of "the internet" as whatever AOL presented to them. How many people do YOU know that think of "the internet" as whatever is on FB?
Out here in the Oregon Coastal Range, we actually do have something like that: http://www.coho.net/
Pretty solid local ISP, radio-based (so line-of-sight is a must), and in spite of their no-torrent policy, pretty awesome people to work with. I'm not a customer (I live in a small valley w/ no tower in range or sight), but folks I know who are can't stop saying how good they are.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
There is always Exede, or any other satellite based internet service. Granted, latency sucks and it isn't great for real-time communications such as voip or skype, but in general it works great.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
You DO have the ability to replace them. But it's expensive. So, got the money? Or when you said "replace them" did you mean "get someone else to replace them"?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I use Exede... pricey, but pretty good. Company VPN is rock-solid, webex and VoIP works well enough, and since I do *nix, ssh sessions are almost perfectly smooth.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I had Hughes for a while. Way too much lag for VPN or VoIP.
It's OpenBTS, not Facebook's new project, that developed incredibly cheap 2.5G GSM service on cheap, software defined radio hardware. That made some sense at the time, but today, why wouldn't you build your wireless network on WiFi instead?
A WiFi AP costs less than $20, and is very powerful if upgraded to OpenWRT, enabling wireless repeaters, QoS, local services, billing, and whatnot. GSM hardware (even with OpenBTS replacing most of it) is still much more expensive, is crufty and old, with security issues and overhead from a different telcom era that doesn't make sense to copy, today.
People want data more than voice, and VoIP makes the later easy over WiFi, too, with open source apps like CSipSimple integrating well with the Android dialer, logs, and contacts. The only thing traditional cellular/GSM has going for it is smooth hand-off, and circa 2008 the 802.11r (fast BSS) addresses that issue nicely.
Don't bother mentioning LTE... It's more efficient, but hardware is astronomically expensive compared to WiFi or OpenBTS, and incredibly power-hungry, too.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Not necessarily. I'm rural and have "broadband." The only option is AT&T DSL. We have regular connection loss when it rains. They know they don't have to send anyone out to fix it because they are the only players in the area and it is clearly their equipment. I fully expect that when they finally have an equipment failure they are just going to say why don't you all move to our cellular data network.
> usually takes me half a dozen tries just to get the Facebook page to load
Same here. Facebook could gain many more users by improving the page load time per dollar spent than they can by adding expensive infrastructure.
But where Verizon has decided to screw them and not offer broadband speeds, despite subsidies and bragging about how the area is 100% broadband?