Lantern outernet receiver
In the review of the year, I noticed a project in Kenya to bring some of the benefits of the internet to poor and far-flung places that don’t have dial-up access to the net let alone broadband – this is the Outernet. They are raising funds on Indiegogo and were oversubscribed, but seem to have fallen into the normal trap of also extending the specifications in response to the increased funding, and thus failing to deliver so far. There was a BBC Click video on it in March 2015 which covers the basic concepts pretty well.
The idea is that a satellite beams down selected websites which are then cached locally and can be accessed. There is no link back up, of course, so people using this won’t be able to ask questions or contribute to blogs like ours, but given the low cost of terabyte hard disks these days it could cache a lot of data and most schools should find it almost as useful as normal internet without the problems of social interaction sites. The plans are to transmit 10Mb/day to the hand-held device (that’s actually a very small part of the satellite’s bandwidth, and I think they have cut a deal to get it donated free) and maybe to increase that, and that the transmission is totally free to the user. With monthly repeats, that means around 300Mb needs to be stored locally – not really a large number and can be easily put onto a Flash memory. Later, I hope they increase the data delivery so that a bigger local library is possible. Using satellite transmission they can achieve 200Mb/day – maybe equivalent to running a low-bandwidth talk-radio station via satellite, and this means that for schools they can send all their core data with faster updates.
In use, you need either their hand-held device or a satellite dish pointing at Hotbird and a satellite receiver system. There’s also a project on the Raspberry Pi blogs that looks pretty good and some people may find this more useful than waiting for the official project to deliver. The project is also helping the roll-your-own people. Collect the data and store it, then you can browse locally without a two-way connection to the net. A bit like Teletext brought up to date.
The decision of what to transmit rests with the originators. I’ll quote from them here:
Wikipedia, Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch Educational courseware of EdX and Khan Academy, Project Gutenberg books, Open Source Ecology plans, audio and video literacy lessons, regular digests of the Bitcoin Blockchain, compiled news bulletins, disaster updates, OpenStreetMap, commodities information, weather information, and much more. The entire Core Archive will be less than 1 TB. Pared down versions will be considerably smaller.
Here’s a quote from their FAQ, which really encapsulates why I think this project is going to have far-reaching consequences:
Why are you trying to give people free information when millions of people are starving?
When reduced to this simple metric for making a difference, why are any of us doing any of our jobs (except those that are feeding people)? Though, this question gets at a bigger idea of why prioritize information access on the long list of global problems to solve. The subject has been studied extensively, but the first to come to mind is Amartya Sen, who wrote in his book Development as Freedom about this very issue. In one example, he cited the 1974 Bangladeshi famine during which food production was ironically quite high. He points to the failure of governance, rather than a food shortage, as the reason. This is just one example. A better predictor of quality of life is not abundance of resources (see Africa) but the level of freedom enjoyed by the population. When it comes to advancing freedom, there is no better tool than information.
This isn’t high-tech, and it’s not even doing things we don’t already know very well how to do. Maybe in 10 years it won’t be needed since the net will reach those far-flung places. On the other hand it fixes an education gap now and allows a whole generation to get a better start in education than they would otherwise have had. Instead of having old and fragile shared textbooks to learn from, the kids and teachers will have up-to-date information. Hopefully that will go further to really improve the world than any food-aid money could hope to do.
It’s not perfect, but it is in operation already and can be seen working. It’s thus something to cheer us up in these days where most of the news is pretty gloomy.
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