Rick Merritt of EE Times talks to Eric Brewer on his vision for a WiFi backbone network that could bring a better life to rural Africa. Brewer spoke about sensor networks at the IEEE Workshop on Wireless Mesh Networks yesterday. He describes his work in the video (below).
“I want people to think big,” said Brewer, a professor of computer science at the U.C. Berkeley who has spent the last five years seeking ways to use WiFi to improve life in rural communities in the developing world.
Brewer and others are part of the Berkeley Tier project which helped establish remote eye clinics in India that have helped as many as 3,000 people regain vision. They also assisted a team that set the world’s record for the longest WiFi link—a 220 mile connection in Venezuela that delivered 6 Mbits/s.
“The secret is you have to be able to see far,” he said of the link that stretched between a relay station on an Andes peak at 4,200 meters to one at sea level.
His WiFi-based Long Distance networks (WiLDNet) are emerging as a potential low-cost alternative to traditional connectivity solutions for rural regions. Humm. I wonder if the architecture would work at 5.4 GHz for grass roots metro backbones.
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