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Sunday, September 05, 2004

Students tackle global drought in telecommunications for the poor

How are developing countries using wireless communications for distance education?

Water, water, everywhere, not a drop to drink: how students plan to tackle global drought in telecommunications for the poor

The spread of wireless communications has taken the developing world by storm. However, the majority in these countries cannot afford a phone.

Digital watches showed that even twenty years ago, electronic hardware was cheap enough to reach the poor. But manufacturers and service providers believed, in a self-fulfilling prophesy, that the poor could not afford telecommunications. Yet, some poor people found ingenious ways, such as only using Caller ID or SMS, to get some benefit of technologies that were priced to exclude them, and proved the industry wrong.

Fortunately, the situation is now rapidly changing. For instance in India, Professor MS Swaminathan spearheads an initiative to bring telecommunications to every village by the year 2007. However, if you multiply 600,000 villages by the cost of a mobile telephony base station, or divide the cost of a phone by the income of people in extreme poverty, you quickly realise that cheaper solutions have to be found. At the same time, telemedicine and distance learning cry out for broadband, for the doctor to be able to see the patient, and the teacher her student.

A characteristic of any industry based on microelectronics, is that the latest technology is also the cheapest. That this does not necessarily reflect in the prices we pay, is largely because of software development, intellectual property and marketing costs. But for a large campaign such as the Indian one, all these costs can be made to disappear.

There are people with knowledge in the latest technologies, students happy to write software for free, microentrepreneurs from among the poor to distribute products and run services, and organisations that can put all these parts together, to trigger an explosion in the usage of telecommunications by the poor. On September 5, 2004, we attempt to bring together a critical mass.

More Info: http://www.freifunk.net:8080/sc2004/wiki/DenmarkGauhatiHookup

Best Wishes,
Bob Zwick
http://www.globaleschool.com


Posted by Bob Zwick on 09/05 at 03:09 PM
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