Brewer's Winning Ideas & Team

This interview profiles the pioneering work being done by Professor Eric Brewer at University of California at Berkeley. He and and his team have been modifiying wifi routers to connect buildings 50 kms or so apart. No extra power is needed, only a special antenna and modifications to the router software. Experiments in Venezuela, India, Uganda, Ghana and Guinea Bissau have proved this technology to work well. If you need to connect buildings, this is a much cheaper alternative to satellite. I see this as being an excellent way to connect local radio stations in Africa who want to share content. It can also be used to connect rurual radio stations to Internet Service Providers in urban areas.

Was delighted to see Brewer has been given an award for this work. The Association for Computing Machinery announced on March 15 2010 that the Berkeley computer-science professor is the winner of the latest ACM-Infosys Foundation award. More info: here

Longdistance Links - the WILD project

I am very interested in the work being done by the University of California at Berkeley and their WILD project. They have been experimenting in several countries, including Ghana in the deployment of modified wifi technology to build very long distance Internet links out into remote areas of the country. 20-80 kms seems feasible now. It is exactly what community radio stations need, and the advantage is that in most cases they already have the tower in the place!