Features

WiFi network powered by bicycle will act as Laos phone system

Lee Felsenstein needs another $25,000 to finish installing a wireless network between five villages in rural Laos, before the monsoons begin - but a ten pound note will help!

You can't stop Mother Nature.

I'm involved in the development of the Remote Village IT Project in rural Laos which must be installed before monsoon rains begin in May. We need your help to put the first hardware in place because the international grants in process will not come through in time.

To date, this project has caught the attention of the Economist, the BBC World Service, and the New York Times Magazine. According to the Times,

"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."

Bicycle? Rube Goldberg?

If you are familiar with my own history - well before I designed the famous Osborne 1 portable computer! - you know that my career has centered around placing computer technology in the hands of ordinary people. These kinds of systems, and this way of applying it from the bottom up, will be necessary if there is to be any hope in bridging the technological gap that divides us from most of the rest of the world.

A year ago I was approached by Lee Thorn, a Vietnam Vet and Director of the Jhai Foundation, who from a perspective of reconciliation has been working with a group of five villages in Laos. After having been uprooted by the bombing of the Plain of Jars, the villagers have little left but their solid social structure. Lacking electricity and phones, they asked Jhai Foundation for a way to make phone calls so that they could communicate with relatives overseas and to secure local crop pricing information. They also wanted the use of small spreadsheets and simple word processing so that they could bid on things like construction jobs.

I sketched out a system of rugged bicycle-powered computers, one per village, interconnected by Wi-Fi (802.11b) digital data links and coupled to the local phone system several miles away. Through this system VOIP (digital telephone) calls could be placed to the local phone lines as well as long-distance calls through Internet telephony to relatives overseas. E-mail would provide a kind of "telegraphy" and the system could be operated by village kids (100 percent literate) trained through an existing local network of Internet Learning Centers affiliated with this project.

Clearly, this is a bare bones project. All hardware and software is off-the-shelf. Open Source software needed for this kind of system has been developed through wireless users groups. Engineers, including myself, are working on a pro bono basis. A Laotian expatriate in Rochester NY will be ready with a "localized" version of Linux in the Lao script in time for the installation. The villagers themselves are preparing and training in anticipation.

The pieces are falling into place. For significant funding to come through, we apparently need to first show that the project will work. However, more importantly, we need to show the villagers that there will be more than unfulfilled promises from us.

Any size donation is welcome and may be made online via PayPal . Please note Remote IT in the "For" field. Donations may also be made by check (note Remote IT) as indicated on the website above.

Your donation will pay for:

$10 20 lbs. shipping costs

$25 Keyboard

$50 Headset

$75 Antenna

$100 Battery

$250 Bicycle Powered Generator

$450 CPU or Mountain Top Solar Panel

$850 Base Station

$1,000 One RT US-Laos Trip for One Technical Consultant

$1,500 One Complete Jhai Computer

$2,500 One Complete Village Set-up

$3,000 Relay Station

$25,000 The Full 5 Village System

I ask you to join with me to keep this project from being rained out.

Thank you for your support.

Lee