Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] What New Technologies and Business Models are on the Horizon?
On 23/11/2004, Paul Richardson wrote: By definition, if the GKD members are working at the edges of the provision of mains power, then telecommunications is also likely to be absent or very expensive (24/7 satellite etc). That last-mile problem (indeed last many hundreds of Kms in remote areas) is why we worked with LEO-satellite receivers for light email-only access with solar-powered rechargeable batteries. We achieved proof of concept in our FP5 (European Research Framework Programme 5) project but unfortunately received no funding in FP6. If anybody is interested in investigating this, see www.InformaticsDevelopmentInstitute.net Patrick O'Beirne www.InformaticsDevelopmentInstitute.net or www.i-d-i.net . This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by USAID's dot-ORG Cooperative Agreement with AED, in partnership with World Resources Institute's Digital Dividend Project, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org and http://www.digitaldividend.org provide more information. To post a message, send it to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: http://www.dot-com-alliance.org/archive.html
Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] What New Technologies and Business Models are on the Horizon?
Dear GKD Members, I run a small company (ExpLAN Computers Ltd) which is the lead partner in a group of 14 companies and individual engineers who have spent the last 4 years designing an ultra-low energy computer suitable for running indefinately off renewable power sources - particularly solar. You can get an overview of the Solo on www.explan.co.uk/solo although the website is deliberately not being kept up to date because we were experiencing problems of others using this as their source of information and then purporting to represent our Design Team! :-( We are in fact at the point of building the Mk IV prototypes during the next three weeks, and I have to take two of them straight to West Africa and return to the UK before my visa expires on 17 Dec 04! With these tight timescales would other contributors please excuse me if I can't keep up with where this thread is going! Nevertheless I am intrigued by Ken DiPietro's comments to GKD, and this open response is provoked by him: Ken, you will understand that most other group members are either currently working or intending to work on the very edges of where computer technology can reach. Whilst some access to mains power or (pollution creating) generators is assumed, our Solo Project is intended to release us from even that requirement. Of course this only solves half the problem...you still need telecommunications if the accessability to Western knowledge or trade markets is to be achieved. By definition, if the GKD members are working at the edges of the provision of mains power, then telecommunications is also likely to be absent or very expensive (24/7 satellite etc). Whether we consider an Iridium satellite link or a typical sub-Saharan African telephone land-line, you will be lucky to achieve 2400 baud! On Tuesday, 16 Nov 2004, Ken DiPietro wrote: [...] In 1999 my wife and I decided to bring high speed Internet connectivity to our area of Vermont as it was unlikely that the bigger players would ever do so. After nearly a year of research, we launched our company, New-ISP.net, delivering high-speed Internet connectivity to businesses in our area using Fixed Wireless and SDSL technology. ..snip... Over the years we have developed a network of suppliers that can provide wireless equipment very inexpensively. I can reliably say that we can light up a town in our area for well under $3,000 all-inclusive. As I understand it you are still reliant on having a proportionally large pipe to transfer the high speed wireless systems in and out of your zone. Moreover, I'm assuming that your service is an instant-response system, requiring live web-access with no store-and-forward technologies using servers. Within the vast majority of the world (defined by both population and land area), this is unachievable because there is no large pipe to start from. Whilst we could readily inter-link rural villages with wireless networking at 53Mb/sec, the bottleneck is the pair of rusty wires at the end of the network which is your modem link to the outside world! We would still be very happy to utilise even this, of course. The most basic raw-text email support would revolutionise the Developing World even if no external web-access were available. :-) South America has implemented a large pipe approach, and has installed a massive fibre-optic ring around the coast of all countries. However it only links the major cities and their principal buildings such as universities. If you are even 1km away from the fibre-optic network then it has had zero impact on your community! I am thrilled to be a part of this discussion and I have nothing but the deepest respect for people, like you, that are working to make this world a better place. There's quite a mixture of members in the GKD group. I would suggest that the majority are working for NGO's funded by the likes of the World Bank, UN, WHO, EU etc. Whilst they are doing wonderful work, they are primarily operating in service-sectors such as Education and Health, or else conducting feasability studies that have no commercial viability. The minority of us GKD members are working in the commercial sector. In the Western World we only get our secondary/service industries because our taxes and personal health-plans (etc) generate enough income for us to pay for them. In the Developing World, we Westerners have supplied secondary/service sector facilities such as schools and clinics, largely through the previous 200 years of missionary work, followed by a plethora of charities and one-off aid/relief appeals. However, until we can assist the countries of the Dev-World to create their own primary/commercial sector industries, they stand no chance of being able to support these expensive service-industries we have supplied them with. Simply *giving* things to the Dev-World doesn't help the problem...even if these things are container-loads of 2nd hand PC's and generators! Moreover, even if we
Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] What New Technologies and Business Models are on the Horizon?
Dear Colleagues, I found this quote fascinating and after thinking quite a bit about it I would like to add a few comments from my perspective. Please allow me to say that I have a reputation in my group of business contacts as having, Ken's patented thinking so far outside of the box that the box looks like a spec of dust on the horizon, if that's the box at all. Please consider yourselves as some kind of warned. humor implied On 11/12/04, Kris Dev [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: For any project or venture to be successful, there has to be a return on investment, tangible or intangible. Without this, the initiative is deemed unproductive and hence a waste. Preferably, for sustainability, at least the variable cost should be covered fully. If it covers either a part or fully the fixed cost, it is ideal. Who can argue with this? I readily admit that I come to you with a very narrow view and I ask your understanding. I look forward to learning from you all and fervently hope that I can repay you with the knowledge and contacts I plan to be able to bring to this challenge. Forgive me for saying this but I believe some of you are missing the bigger picture from what I can see. In our industry (we refer to ourselves as WISPS) we look at our overall job as replacing the telephone company one small installation at a time. I believe this closely parallels what many of you are trying to do but there is no existing communications infrastructure in place and where there is, it is substandard. Fine, I see opportunity there. Please allow me to explain. I believe we are all in agreement that there is an enormous task ahead of us that has so many different facets that it is sometimes hard to know where to start. I believe many of these issues are interrelated and that by attacking some of them many of the rest will work themselves out in ways that we might even have trouble predicting. Take, for example, communications. How would we attack this problem in our society? To describe this in very simple terms, we would put together a plan, raise capital, train the personnel, provide the equipment bought with the capital we raised and then build the network. The idea is that we would build a telephone company that would provide a for pay service which would employ trained people to maintain and expand the network as necessary but most importantly would make a small percentage of profit that would be returned to the investors. I apologize for the over-simplification. At the same time I would ask you to look at the value the US telecommunications industry commands. This is exactly what we would be building but on a substantially smaller scale. Still, real tangible value, nonetheless. What I don't see happening here (and I may have missed it in earlier discussions) is that there doesn't seem to be any value accorded to the network itself once it is built. Assuming that we didn't look at the connection of this network to the worldwide telephone network but instead only considered it as an infrastructure useful to the people that built/run it, the costs would be very low indeed. So, what I would propose would be to create an investment group that also doubles as a charity (in case of failure) that would allow people from both sides of the divide to collaborate in building out this connectivity network. Perhaps we could structure it so as small communities adopt or partner with communities in developing nations, they invest a small amount of money in their sister community and help build this out. Considering that many of these smaller communities could be connected to the countrywide network for only a few hundred dollars I would expect this kind of support could be pretty easily generated. With the proper coordination we would have a network built that would have enormous value to the people it served, allowing intra-country communications for almost nothing. This kind of infrastructure allows for trade, collaboration and the ability to have access to information that would otherwise not be available. I should probably say that I realize that I am preaching to the choir but I too believe this is critical. One more thing and I will then return you to your daily activities. In the next several months we will be seeing some truly revolutionary technological devices being introduced into the mainstream market. The next generation of cell phones will have the capacity built in to connect to WiFi networks. There is already an open-source system that can be built using an old computer that is capable of handling 255 concurrent telephone calls. In other words, it is now becoming possible to roll your own telephone company for next to nothing while providing Internet connectivity. I came to you all with the promise of trying to share with you how communications networks can be built on next to no resources and I dearly hope that I can do exactly that. I have received a few requests for information and I will try to
Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] What New Technologies and Business Models are on the Horizon?
On Tuesday, November 16, 2004, Ken DiPietro wrote: To give you a specific example, not including the upstream connection to the net, we can provide everything necessary to connect and distribute access to 10 points in a town (with specific RF requirements taken into account) for well under $1,000 total. While doing so, we are also creating a small business that would act as equipment manufacturer and installation service provider, for maintenance and as an ISP. While this sounds complicated I can assure you it is not and the entire process can be taught pretty quickly. We are at Jhai Foundation are very interested in what you can teach, Ken! I will cc some of our folks. For what it is worth, I think Ken is offering us what I often have seen offered and often have seen accomplished in many places in the developing world. Amazing ingenuity...and doing things on the cheap ..and still making enough profit (or creating a sustaining side-business that makes profit) to keep going. I think some of the best thinking on Earth is done by poor people. I think when you open up to this, then many things become possible. Bootstrapping is one. Ingenious solutions is another. Very well-localized solutions are another. This is something that MNCs actually know. Think about drug companies, for example. Where do you think they, uh, steal the ideas for the templates for new drugs? From shamans in remote villages. MNCs tend quite often to forget the respecting this takes...as do most of us, definitely including me. But we can also remember it, if we are prompted. I think the problem is we are all too impressed with ourselves to see what is in front of us. What if this entire discussion was turned on its head? Forget the precision (or vaguery) of good business and economic language. What if we simply asked: how do we get to know poor people well enough that they trust us enough to let us help them create their own solutions? Then we can talk. Then we are bringing something to the table. And what we can bring to the table, if we are smart, is our whole selves. And it takes that to come to any conclusions that hold. It takes all of each of us - our expertise, our mistakes (the base of much expertise), our good and bad relationships, our class, nationality and ..etc...background...all of ourselves. What happens when we bring our whole selves to the table? A brief story. Vorasone and I were working in Phon Kham, Lao PDR, with a bunch of villagers we had known at that time for about two years. We were trying to get them to do a '10 year vision'. They were resisting. They said, 'Just tell us what you can bring and we'll do that.' Vorasone and I kept saying, 'No,' and kept trying to bring the conversation back where we wanted it. This went on for almost two hours. Finally, I was backing out the door of the house pontificating and I stumbled over the door jam and fell to the ground in a heap. I started laughing. The whole group started laughing at the same time - not in response to my laughing but in response to my foolishness. They were not falling in line with my 'laughing' leadership. They thought it was funny that I fell down! Then the head of the women's association for the village, Noi, said, In 10 years I want... and listed about six things. Next the head of the Elders association chimed in...and we were off to the races. The only thing I brought of value was my whole self...as foolish as it is. A lot of the frustration I hear in the voices of people close to the ground in this discussion is just about this: how do we turn this discussion on its head? Maybe it is time for us to just fall down, laugh, listen very carefully ..and get on with it. yours, in Peace, Lee Thorn chair, Jhai Foundation 350 Townsend St., Ste. 309 San Francisco, CA 94112 1 415 344 0360 [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.jhai.org This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by USAID's dot-ORG Cooperative Agreement with AED, in partnership with World Resources Institute's Digital Dividend Project, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org and http://www.digitaldividend.org provide more information. To post a message, send it to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: http://www.dot-com-alliance.org/archive.html
Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] What New Technologies and Business Models are on the Horizon?
Dear GKD List Members, I, too, am grateful to be part of this list. Ken DiPietro and I have known each other and worked together for several years now. We operate a wireless ISP in Georgia as well as market low-cost outdoor hardware to other wireless ISPs. I strongly feel that we can help out with many of the projects that involve telecommunications infrastructure. As Ken has already mentioned, we both started with little or no startup cash and have managed to build out, as needed, to areas that would otherwise not be served with broadband connections. We have proven that it is possible to establish a reliable infrastructure with very little capital, and we are eager to help out where we can, to share this knowledge and experience with you all. Please feel free to ask us questions, etc. We are more than willing to help out where we can! -Hal -- Harold Bledsoe Deliberant Wireless http://www.deliberant.com This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by USAID's dot-ORG Cooperative Agreement with AED, in partnership with World Resources Institute's Digital Dividend Project, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org and http://www.digitaldividend.org provide more information. To post a message, send it to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: http://www.dot-com-alliance.org/archive.html
