The presented innovative telecom system is invented specifically to "wire" local communities in remote and rural areas by way of wireless voice and e-mail messages. The self relaying nature of the solar-powered Weave grid of devices gives this new telecom system the potential to bring low-cost telecom and Internet functions to billions of people on this planet. It can further interwork with the present telephony and Internet networks.

Keywords: telecom infrastructure, packet radio, developing countries and rural areas, the Weave

1. Introduction and statement of the problem

The problem of the "Digital Divide" in the world is often mentioned.  This term indicates the huge difference in computer- and tele-density between rich and poor nations. A closer look reveals that the ICT density difference within countries: between cities and rural villages is even more striking. The profitability, and therefore investment ranking, from high to low in telecom is:

• international links
• national backbones
• large city networks
• district centre networks
• rural villages phoneboxes
• remote farms

Not surprisingly the teledensity of rural areas in developing countries is hopelessly inadequate. This has two big disadvantages for the population. It is very difficult for villagers to reach emergency-services, to reach for knowledge or to conduct trade when they have to walk for hours or even days to reach a telephone to contact specialists or markets concentrated in the cities. Reversely, those villagers can not be reached by the specialists and markets from the cities. The other obstacle is that communication between local villagers in their communities, sometimes living or travelling far apart is difficult too.

This paper analyses the situation and proposes a new telecom solution for hundreds of millions of villagers, which is feasible and low cost with a clever combination of recently developed available technologies. An earlier stage of the idea presented here was published on the Internet Web in July, 2000 [Van Till, 2000].

2. The present situation in voice telephony and Internet access

Obstacles to further penetration are:

• Large necessary investments in cables, transmission and switching infrastructure and resources. Recurring costs of maintaining, service and billing personnel. These levels of investments and costs apply to mobile phone networks too;
• High PC costs for purchase, quick obsolescence, maintenance, power, back-up, peripheral equipment, software versions, training, modems, telephony and ISP services;

One of the largest problems we have to face is how we can try to keep remote villages feasible to live in. The main trend is that villagers all over the world travel and try their luck in the already overcrowded large and even superlarge cities of our world.

There are a large number of national, ISOC, UN and ITU coordinated efforts put into the further spreading of telephony and Internet access, but these efforts will take decades to reach remote areas and villages in deserts and jungles of Asia, Africa and South America. The Republic of China has for instance a ten-year plan to put at least one phone in every village of their western areas.

Conclusion: billions of people will have NO access to telephony or Internet for the next ten to twenty years.

The challenge is to try to interconnect, to weave the people locally together first and then connect this Local Village to other villages and the Global Village. Will this be useful to support messages, transactions and family ties for local social, cultural and economic cohesion?

Can we construct very low cost telecom devices which can be introduced and spread out literally "bottom up" from the desert into the villages into the towns??

And can the villagers reach out and connect into the networks of the rest of the world too??

If we break away from the usual assumption that we need complete functionality of telephony and Internet, we can do without the very costly network infrastructure and PC components and still get the most important partial functionalities (voice messages and e-mail communication) at a fraction of the costs at outskirts of the remote areas as a stepping stone towards later full functionality worldwide.

So, the TELLET proposal, repeated here, is to introduce very low cost wireless devices with only partial voice functionality (no direct conversations, but stored voice messages) and partial Internet functionality (no PC, no direct PC-WebPages interaction, but only SMS, E-mail and possibly e-mail enabled data access)

The more devices in an area the better the parallel total transmission capacity of the network is, without the need for other telecom infrastructure. In fact the devices are their own infrastructure! By overlap between village networks this "Weave" can spread over the globe in a few years. Such remote local wireless message grids can be interconnected to the national telephone and Internet networks, creating paid traffic and services there.

Main function of the device of the Tellet Project local village Weave network would be a local "intercom" between family members which can be miles apart in the field. By easily preselected choice on the device one or several family members can be sent a voice message. Or after "dialing" the number of the person you want to reach, you can enter a speech message into the device for transmission, after you have played it back to hear if it is recorded correctly.

If the voice signal is coded by DSP chip this gives a stream of 8 Kb/s. A message for instance of 50 seconds would be stored on the receiving or relaying devices as 40 K Bytes.

At the portable device of the destination an optical signal can signify that a personal voicemessage is waiting, like on an answering machine. Locally delay can be short so message reception and answering could be quick enough to approach a conversation. But also the incoming messages can be played several times or collected and stored for later reply.

And SMS plus E-mail can be added to the functions. One very interesting possibility of non-realtime e-mail messages is the future addition of language translation to this network, making its scope world-wide indeed. And it may be possible to connect PCs to this grid later to use the massively parallel paths of the Weave for IP-transmission to connect with the World Wide Web.

The described new telecom system 'for the rest of the World' has most of the characteristics of a "disruptive technology", as described by [Christensen, 1997]. New user group, simple to use and implement, less functionality at first, and no demand for it (yet).

1. Do members of small remote villages want such a personal "halfway" telecom system or would they rather wait for a phonebox in the village centre?
2. Can we imagine a number of completely new "value chains" on the described Weave network?
3. Can we get funding to publish and promote the spreading of this idea, and to encourage universities and companies to start R&D projects to make prototypes and do field trials?

 

References

[OESO 1998]. Internet Infrastructure Indicators, report DIST/ICCP/TISP(98)/Final. OESO: Working Party on Telecommunications and Information Services Policies.
[Siemens, 2000] "2000 International Telecom Statistics", yearbook dec 1999; Siemens AG, Munich, 2000
[Van Till 2000] The TELLET Project Proposal, version 2.3, July 23 , 2000, http://huizen.dds.nl/~vantill/divide.html
[ Christensen,1997] The Innovator's Dilemma, Harvard Business School Press, USA.