[MLB-WIRELESS] The Pedal-Powered Internet

[Clae]

>Date: Fri, 03 Jan 2003 11:56:29 +1100
>Subject: [nytimes] The Pedal-Powered Internet
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/magazine/15PEDA.html
>
>The Pedal-Powered Internet
>
>By CLIVE THOMPSON
>
>Picture this: A remote farmer in the dirt-poor country of Laos wants
>to check some e-mail. So he goes to the only computer in his village.
>(It's bolted to the floor of a public building, to prevent theft.) He
>brings a friend along -- not to Web-surf with him, but to pedal a
>bicycle-driven generator that powers the computer. When they've
>cranked out enough juice, they can log onto the Web, using a
>jury-rigged set of wireless antennae. It's a clunky system made out of
>spare parts, but when it goes live next year, it will become the
>newest way to hook up the developing world: the pedal-powered
>Internet.
>
>The Laotian farmers hatched the scheme this year while talking with
>development workers from the Jhai Foundation, a San Francisco
>nonprofit group. Laos is a brutal place to farm, littered with
>Vietnam-era unexploded ordnance and racked by a dusty dry season. The
>farmers figured that the Web would help them track weather movements
>and price swings in rice, allowing them to optimize the scanty profits
>from their crops. "And they all want to keep in touch with their
>families," says Lee Thorn, Jhai's chairman. "They all left the
>bombed villages, so these families are really isolated. There are
>people they haven't had contact with for 25 years."
>
>There's just one problem. How do you bring the Web to people who don't
>have phone lines -- or even electricity?
>
>With a level of ingenuity that would have impressed Robinson Crusoe,
>it turns out. Thorn's group is cobbling together five inexpensive
>computers with out-of-date microchips. To link these computers to the
>Internet, they're using cheap wireless broadcasting stations -- much
>like the ones that you can buy at Radio Shack for a few hundred
>dollars. A tower located in a Laotian city will tap into the Net and
>the local phone system, then blast the signal toward the villages nine
>miles away. A second tower will catch that signal and route it
>wirelessly to each village, like a hub with spokes. No expensive
>satellites or copper-wire phone lines needed. And as for electricity?
>That pedal-power technology is straight out of "Gilligan's Island."
>"It's the same stuff I had on my bike when I was a kid, to power my
>headlight," Thorn says.
>
>Development groups are watching the project closely, and for good
>reason. With this strange Rube Goldberg contraption, the farmers will
>effectively leapfrog 100 years of technological evolution. This year,
>they're living in the 19th century; next year, they'll be in the 21st.
>Few have traveled so far using a bicycle.
>
>Further information:
>
>http://www.oblomovka.com/mirrors/lee/
>http://www.jhai.org/jhai_remoteIT.html
>http://slashdot.org/articles/03/01/02/1912258.shtml?tid=126


-- 
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
   insert twee, inoffensive .sig joke
     and teddy-bear ascii art here
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

To unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo at wireless.org.au
with "unsubscribe melbwireless" in the body of the message