{"id":5023,"date":"2011-08-30T07:35:21","date_gmt":"2011-08-30T07:35:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.faceofmalawi.com\/?p=5023"},"modified":"2011-08-30T07:35:21","modified_gmt":"2011-08-30T07:35:21","slug":"the-case-for-wifi-in-developing-markets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/2011\/08\/30\/the-case-for-wifi-in-developing-markets\/","title":{"rendered":"The Case for WiFi in Developing Markets"},"content":{"rendered":"

Courtesy\u00a0of\u00a0http:\/\/malawiwifiproject.blogspot.com<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

With advancements in WiFi technology and economies of scale in the BILLIONS, a pair of new carrier grade, high power 802.11n outdoor WiFi radios can be deployed with high gain grid antennas for line-of-sight point-to-point long distance links up to 36km with up to 100Mbps+ of real TCP\/IP throughput for less than $300 USD while tiny outdoor access points with 1000mW of output power that can cover up to 100m and handle up to 54Mbps are less than $100 USD. And to expand the coverage area, a pair of meshable 5GHz nanostations with up to 10km of range and support for up to 25+Mbps of throughput performance can be purchased for $150 USD. All together, a meshed three node system to cover the market area of a trading center village would cost less than $1000 USD. Of course, shipping, duties, and taxes would affect true prices outside the United States.<\/p>\n

That is amazing; around 300m (~1000ft or 23 acres) of WiFi coverage with backhaul and long-distance transmission for only $1000 USD. That means a telecommunications provider with fiber Ethernet ports and tower infrastructure could provide high speed internet services to the market area of trading center villages for $1000 USD per village (excluding deployment costs, shipping, and duties). Even if coverage is expanded into residential areas most towns could be covered for less than $10,000 USD.<\/p>\n

How do these costs compare to deploying a cellular-based system? Typically between 1\/10th and 1\/5th from most reports.<\/p>\n

And even better, there is no need to subsidize devices or require expensive modems; that means a larger addressable market when cheap WiFi devices hit the market soon. WiFi is now standard on smartphones; over a BILLION WiFi chips will ship in 2011.<\/p>\n

The other thing nice about these WiFi networks are the ability to interconnect villages for peer-to-peer communications and add local area content that resides on an external hard drive connected to the headnode router via USB.<\/p>\n

This means that if the internet is not available, goes down or is slow, local content will be fast; even supporting high quality video streaming. New content can be distributed via USB flash storage and motorbikes.<\/p>\n

Villages can then be interconnected in ring topologies to facilitate commerce through a One Village One Product “craigslist style” online classifieds portal and peer-to-peer communications.<\/p>\n

This is the perfect middle mile and last mile solution for providing affordable internet services in developing economies where price sensitivity is the number one requirement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Courtesy\u00a0of\u00a0http:\/\/malawiwifiproject.blogspot.com   With advancements in WiFi technology and economies of scale in the BILLIONS, a pair of new carrier grade, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5027,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[400,284],"tags":[1146,288,1147,1148,1149],"class_list":["post-5023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-telecommunications","category-search-engine-development","tag-computer","tag-internet","tag-it","tag-markets","tag-wifi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5023\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}