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Press Clips
TECH REVIEW: WIRELESS
Wi-Fi is
Aiming for the Masses
Asia's executives are
familiar with the spread of Wi-Fi hot spots across the region's bustling
business districts. But the real revolution is happening far from the
glitz--in the developing world
By Jeremy
Wagstaff/JAKARTA
Issue cover-dated June
17, 2004
FORGET THE UBIQUITOUS
Wi-Fi hot spots spreading across Asia's coffee shops and airport
lounges. The real wireless revolution is happening in the developing
world, where roads and telephones are basic, rare, or nonexistent.
Take, for example, the inhabitants
of a nest of villages in the northeastern corner of Cambodia.
They're about as remote as you're likely to get in Southeast Asia: Two
hours' bumpy ride to the nearest town, itself a 16-hour car and ferry
ride from the capital Phnom Penh should you miss the frequently
cancelled twice-weekly flight. Now, thanks to a United States-based
company called First Mile Solutions and a former American journalist
called Bernard Krisher, a motorbike equipped with a computer and a Wi-Fi
access point passes through the villages daily. Once in range of an
antenna stuck on the village school wall, it uploads outgoing e-mail
messages wirelessly from a computer inside the school. Incoming messages
are simultaneously sent the other way.
There's another part of the
revolution that former U.S. military bomb loader Lee Thorn is busy
implementing in neighbouring Laos: Remote villages all over the
developing world can use Wi-Fi, the wireless standard of communication
also called 802.11, to get better prices for their produce--from crops
at the market in the next valley to the traditional textiles they sell
over the Internet. For five hamlets 100 kilometres north of the Laotian
capital of Vientiane, that's already happening via a network of
bicycle-powered computers linked to the Internet by a simple dial-up
modem in the local hospital. But most important, it also gives the
villagers something even more useful: A telephone link to each other
using a simple protocol called Voice over Internet, or VoIP. "We
think that just by getting information on the prices of key crops from
market towns the economic impact of this . . . will be huge," says
Thorn.
In corners of Asia, away from the
bustling business districts, a loose array of activists, entrepreneurs
and former dotcommers is cobbling together ad-hoc Wi-Fi networks using
whatever suits the environment, from bicycles and sonar panels to power
computers, to motorbikes, buses, bullock carts and bicycles, to carry
connections where such means are cheaper than installing the
infrastructure needed for a network that's always connected. What they
offer villages and poorer urban neighbourhoods are connections to the
Internet, to local government, to expert medical assistance, to market
prices, to relatives overseas, or just a cheap phone call to a
neighbouring village cut off by monsoon rains. Consider it a
technological leapfrog without wires.
Wi-Fi is not a particularly new technology. In the past two
years, Wi-Fi access points, or hot spots, have sprung up across Asian
cities. But only now is it coming into its own. For one thing, it's an
open standard, meaning there are few if any royalties to pay for using
it. Secondly, it's relatively easy to set up. But most importantly, it's
cheap--and getting cheaper. Now, $70 buys you an all-in-one access
point, router and built-in processor. Plug that into a cable modem or
other Internet connection and you are an instant Wi-Fi Internet service
provider. No other equipment, including computer, is necessary. It's the
drop in prices in the past couple of years that has put Wi-Fi within
everyone's reach, and suddenly makes building whole networks feasible.
"Prices have really fallen," says Bona Simanjuntak, an
Indonesian educator who managed to stretch a single Wi-Fi project grant
of $3,000 to cover two projects by searching for cheap equipment.
The result is fast-growing Wi-Fi
networks that turn local projects into virtually national ones. Krisher,
in his 70s, says he is now moving beyond the limited goal of a small
cluster of village networks. Next month he plans to almost double the
number of schools connected by adding another 10 schools in Pailin in
southwestern Cambodia, and another 10-20 later this year.
"Ultimately we hope to have 150 schools linked," he says in a
recent e-mail from the field. In India, similar projects have also taken
off under the name DakNets--Dak being Hindi for
"postal"--connecting villages using whatever transport is
available, from bicycles to buses. Villagers use the connection to
communicate with relatives overseas, local officials or doctors via
e-mail, voice or even Webcam.
Bridging a Gap
It's not always about hooking up the rural poor to the Internet and
phones. In urban Indonesia, phone access is not so much of a problem.
Falling prices of second-hand cellphones and the availability of
low-denomination prepaid phone-cards have meant that few households on
heavily populated islands like Java are far from a phone. But that's not
much help for students and other people looking for Internet access:
Fixed lines are still expensive, connections are poor and phone bills
steep. Cable Internet access is still limited to the wealthier parts of
the capital, Jakarta.
This means that while the Internet
itself is within reach of the country's 210 million people, it's
hampered by a gap in what's known as the "last mile"--the
connection between the local provider and the end user. That's where
people like a former university professor, Onno Purbo, have stepped in,
building their own wireless networks by adding stronger antennas to
indoor Wi-Fi equipment and sticking them on rooftops. Already, Purbo
says, he and his colleagues have built nearly 10,000 nodes across Java
and southern Sulawesi, and are adding up to 300 more a month.
That amounts to 1 million subscribers, and 22 networks in Jakarta alone.
Suddenly, cheap and reliable Internet access is within reach of
Indonesia's urban poor. "Basically we bypass the last mile,"
he says.
That's how a modest tourism college
in a run-down suburb of east Jakarta has suddenly found itself hooked up
to fast Internet connections, giving students the opportunity to
research on-line, to continue courses even when they are training in
other parts of the country, and for staff to earn extra money
moonlighting as travel agents or computer technicians. The local brains
behind it, 25-year old Bona Simanjuntak, has already covered most of the
running costs of the business by selling bandwidth to nearby Internet
cafes and homes via the same Wi-Fi mast that juts into the sky above the
college's main courtyard. His boss, college chief A. Bukhaeri, beams
proudly as Simanjuntak draws diagrams of the network he has built.
"What we have here is a chance to grow our minds," he says.
Of course, there are problems. Wi-Fi is easy enough to install,
requiring no cable-laying or huge infrastructure costs, but it has its
weaknesses. Antennas must be within line of sight of each other, and
don't work well through vegetation. Tanzanian consultant and
entrepreneur Robi Machabi recently told a seminar on rural Internet
access in Stockholm of his problems connecting his Internet
service provider, JuaNet, across the vast Serengeti plains, where
line-of-sight links were hampered by the curvature of the earth. In
Jakarta, Simanjuntak's connection to his Internet source in southern
Jakarta was interrupted by the construction of an office block in the
signals' path.
And while such networks don't have
the problem of cables being eaten, severed or damaged, they are hostage
to other elements: Simanjuntak's Wi-Fi mast is the tallest structure in
the area, rendering it vulnerable to lightning strikes, one of which
fried some of his equipment late last month. On the remote Pacific
island of Niue, Internet entrepreneur Richard St. Clair was able to
track the approach of Cyclone Heta earlier this year via the Internet,
but then had to dismantle as much as he could of the island's Wi-Fi
network as the storm neared land. Most of the equipment, in storm-proof
containers, survived and he was able to reinstate the network.
Meanwhile, the local telecommunications provider was still retrieving
its satellite dish, which had blown a quarter of a mile away and
resembled, in St. Clair's words, "a giant twisted, crumpled beer
can." Now, five months later, the world's first Wi-Fi nation is
back on-line.
Legal Problems, Too
Then there are the legal problems. Telecoms companies aren't happy about
losing business, which means VoIP is strictly circumscribed in countries
like Indonesia. Even Wi-Fi connections, which use the 2.4 gigahertz
frequency, are tightly regulated in Indonesia, leaving most of Onno
Purbo's outdoor connections on the wrong side of the law. Purbo says he
is often fending off government officials trying to take down his
antennas and confiscate equipment, though in most cases he's able to
talk them out of it. "To solve this problem we usually just given
them $10 whenever they come," he says.
And sometimes the legal problems
merge into the political. Thorn's village project in Laos has run
into problems with defence officials who, he says, have stopped the
project going live on national security grounds. In a telephone
interview Thorn says that while he hopes the situation can be resolved,
his board may instruct him to take the project elsewhere if the
stalemate is not resolved this month. It's a reflection, he says, of the
broader implications of connecting people. "People sense it could
have fairly important changes in the villages and to understand all that
ahead of time is pretty hard to do," he says.
Write to Jeremy Wagstaff at jw@jeremywagstaff.com
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