> On May 29, 2018, at 12:49 , Ben Cannon <b...@6by7.net> wrote:
>
> Everyone in Haiti had a cell phone. Everyone. Even the poorest of the poor.
> They skipped the enormous expense of copper infrastructure.
>
> The world is very different in person.
>
> And these pockets of extreme isolation sound like a prime opportunity for a
> WISP or other disruption.
In some cases, this is a viable solution. In others, not so much.
There are places, for example, where one has to be concerned that your
infrastructure will be creatively “recycled” by the locals when you aren’t
looking.
Also, deploying a WISP still requires the ability to bring Power to all and
Wired Connectivity to some of your deployments.
As I mentioned earlier, Haiti is a relatively easy Wireless deployment
topography. Try doing the same thing in the Nevada desert, where the iron rich
base minerals combined with the alkali top soil creates a kind of RF sink-hole
that causes walkie-talkies that go 3-5 miles anywhere else to fail in as little
as 1/4 mile and that’s in the flat areas. Add in the mountains and you’ve got a
real interesting deployment where you might need 4 or 5 base stations just to
reach 1-2 customers.
There are solutions that can work just about everywhere, but there’s no one
solution that works everywhere.
Owen
>
> -Ben
>
> On May 29, 2018, at 7:16 AM, John R. Levine <jo...@iecc.com> wrote:
>
>>> I am sure these third world nations have more important things to spend
>>> their money on rather than data plans and data devices. Things like food
>>> and medicine come to mind...
>>
>> My goodness, aren't we condescending. Since we're talking about Kenya here,
>> a few milliseconds of research reminds us that it's a significant
>> agricultural exporter. Agricultural development there is generally about
>> better use of existing land.
>>
>> You might also want to learn about M-Pesa, the mobile phone payment system
>> that everybody uses. Stores all have a sign with their M-Pesa number so you
>> can pay them, and there are kiosks all over Nairobi that will exchange
>> M-Pesa credit and cash. The 1GB data bundles I mentioned are large ones.
>> You can get 7MB for a day or 5MB for a week for 5c, which is plenty to check
>> your messages or look up farm prices.
>>
>> People in Africa may be poorer than we are, but they are just as smart as we
>> are, and they are just as able and interested in technology when it is
>> useful to them.
>>
>> R's,
>> John
