Paper for the "ITS 12th European
Regional Conference"- Dublin,Ireland; September 2-3, 2001
International Telecommunications Society
www.itsEurope.org
NETWEAVING RURAL VILLAGES:
INTRODUCING THE WEAVE
Ir. Jaap van Till, Stratix Consulting
Group B.V.
P.O. Box 75554, 1118 ZP Amsterdam Airport, The Netherlands
Phone +31 20 44 66 555, fax +31 20 44 66 560, jaap.vantill@stratix.nl
Abstract
Teledensity in remote areas of the world is very low and it is not expected
that that situation will change very soon, because present telecom investments
do tend to go to large cities and regional population centres first. Therefore
many people in rural villages will not have the opportunity to improve the
quality of their life and their local community by using telecom for social
and economic transactions, among each other and long distance. The presented
innovative telecom system is defined specifically to help "wire" local communities
in remote and rural areas, by way of wireless voice- and e-mail messaging.
The peer-to-peer routing and self relaying nature of the proposed solar-powered
grid of devices, without the need for central infrastructures, gives this
new telecom system the potential to bring low-cost telecom and internet functions
to billions of people on this planet. And this new local Weave grid can
interconnect to and interwork with the present telephony and Internet networks,
creating traffic and new services there too. Possible worldwide impact on
teledensity and some of its policy consequences are presented.
1. INTRODUCTION AND STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
Often the problem of the "Digital Divide" in the world is mentioned as
the huge difference in teledensity and computer density between rich and
poor nations.
A closer look reveals that the ICT density difference within countries,
between cities and rural villages & areas is even more striking. This
a problem since it is recognized that an important factor in social, cultural
and economic prosperity, and thus the quality of life, is the ability of
people of cooperate, transact and communicate locally and long distance.
And if life in rural areas and remote villages is not feasible people will
continue to move to large cities in search for work, food and sustaining
systems. In many developing countries plans have been announced to bring
"at least one telephone to every remote village" in the coming decades. This
will require enormous efforts and government investments and even then it
will not help many families who live in forests or in the mountains or who
move around with their cattle to reach other family members or villagers
many miles away. And commercial investors do not see these remote needs as
their first priority either. The profitability, and therefore investment
ranking, from high to low, in telecom infrastructure is:
- international links
- national backbones
- large city networks
- district centre networks
- rural villages phone boxes
- remote farms
Not surprisingly the teledensity of rural areas in developing countries
is hopelessly inadequate, and will stay that way in the foreseeable future
if we stick to present telecom technology systems only. This has two big
disadvantages for the population. It is very difficult for villagers to reach
emergency-services, to reach for knowledge to solve problems or to conduct
trade or organise logistics when they have to walk for hours or even days
to reach a telephone to contact specialists or markets concentrated in the
cities. And in the other direction, 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 own communities, sometimes living or travelling
far apart is difficult too. Social, cultural and economic transaction costs
in time and money stay too high for local cooperation to flourish and communities
to prosper.
This paper analyses the situation and proposes a new telecom solution
for hundreds of millions of villagers, which is feasible and can be made
low cost with a clever combination of recently developed available technologies.
An earlier version of the idea presented here was published on the Web, called
"the TELLET proposal" /1/.
2. The present situation in voice telephony and Internet access.
Besides the networks for radio- and TV-broadcasting two other worldsize
infrastructures are being rolled out over the word. Fixed line- and
mobile voice telephony now has in total about 1100 million and 800 million
of subscribers respectively, with rapid growth in sales of GSM mobile phones
all over the world, so mobile phones in some countries even exceed the number
of fixed line phone connections. Teledensity (fixed + mobile telephones /
100 inhabitants) is spread very unequally between 103 lines /100 inhabitants
in some rich countries to 0.01 % in remote areas of poor countries. Internet
access now has a penetration of about 300 million PC's connected, also with
a fast growth rate all over the world. /2/3/
Obstacles to further penetration are:
- Large investments necessary in telephony cables, transmission and
switching infrastructure and resources
- Large recurring costs for skilled maintenance-, service- and billing
personnel. These levels of investments and costs apply to mobile phone
networks and internet backbones too;
- High PC costs for purchase, replacement because of quick obsolescence,
maintenance, power, back-up, peripheral equipment, software versions, training,
modems, telephone time cost and ISP services;
Consequences are that both voice telephony and Internet use are relatively
expensive and concentrated mainly in the larger cities for people who can
afford ICT and can use it in government or creating more wealth in those
cities. Indeed the economies and populations of most countries get interconnected
and interlinked more globally every day, except for the remote areas of those
countries which are left behind. Young people and craftsmen leave the villages
for education or better jobs in the larger centres of population.
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 co-ordinated efforts
put into the further spreading of telephony and Internet access, but
these 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 very limited or even NO access
to telephony or Internet for the next ten to twenty years, unless we do
something about it.
The challenge therefore 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. This will be useful to support messages, transactions
and family ties for local social, cultural and economic cohesion. This should
not be considered as "anti-globalisation", but a plea to urgently fill the
vacuum at the lower end of the spectrum too. Not directly aimed at the benefit
of the affluent nations and their huge telecom backbones but at the well-being
of the rural communities, which are not well-connected to us at all yet.
So the problem stated here is: 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 with these devices and connect into the networks of the rest of the
world too?
3. ANALYSIS AND PROPOSED SOLUTION
If we look really closely at voice telephony at present, voice-mail
messages or answering machines functions can cover a large part of the functionality
of person-to-person conversations. Big advantage of 'messaging' is that we
do not have to be present or have to interrupt other activities when such
conversations are not conducted in real time. Just imagine a telephone system,
which runs with spoken messages only. Such a system could do without
end-to-end connections through 'cleared' circuits and switches, which are
very costly and dimensioned in terms of transmission delay and switching
capacity. So in this case the telecom infrastructure investments would be
very much reduced since only store and forward of non-urgent voicemail is
required. In such a NON-realtime network we could very easily add SMS
messaging and E-mail messaging for those users who are literate. E-mail is
the most used and most important component of Internet use in the world, and
it does not require high capacity links either if we leave out real-time WWW.
If we can implement such local rural message-only networks the users can
exchange voice messages and SMS or e-mail messages not only locally, but
world wide too with the present telephony and Internet subscribers!! A remote
message-only network could be viewed therefore as a access ring around the
present telecom networks.
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. This message-only network is the essential idea
of the "TELLET proposal", mentioned before.
To implement such a network the proposal 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). Since the network requirements for non-realtime traffic
are very low, we propose to implement the function of the telecom infrastructure
into the proposed wireless devices themselves!
This means implementation of peer-to-peer switching and -routing of messages
over wireless links between the portable devices. No further telecom
infrastructure investment and maintenance locally would be necessary.
This idea of a 'network with end-user terminals only and no infrastructure'
is not as theoretical a it may seem. In fact such an IP communication system
is supposed to be in use for instance by the U.S. Army mounted on vehicles
when they drive into a battlefield, like in the Iraki desert. It is obvious
that they have to carry their own telecom infrastructure with them. So why
not develop a similar yet portable structure to hunters and gatherers in
the Gobi desert or in the mountains of Malawi?
4. EXAMPLE OF IMPLEMENTATION AND SYSTEM OUTLINE
Proposed in this paper is to give or sell to every adult in remote villages
a personal addressable device which is solar powered or handpowered. The individual
devices can be the size of for example Palm organizer handsets or GSM
handsets and are linked by digital radio communication (peer-to-peer packet
radio like BlueTooth or Wi-Fi =WLAN IEEE 802.11b).
Most of the components and subsystems of this proposed network are
already available. For instance the company Rooftop, now part of Nokia, sells
routers which can be linked into grids for packet-radio IP wireless access
to Internet. Systems sold by Aironet, now part of Cisco, have similar functionality.
Essential of the proposed network is that the devices use each other as
store and forward relays/routers (peer-to-peer switching and peer-to-peer
routing. 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! And this grid grows
simply by adding more devices, thus automatically absorbing the extra traffic
of the added devices. By overlap between village networks this "Weave" can
spread bottom-up over the globe in a few years.
Such remote local wireless peer-to-peer message grids can be interconnected
in many places to the national telephone and Internet networks, creating
paid traffic and services there. So its appearance would not pose a threat
to the present network operators and carriers but would on the contrary boost
their business. Their subscribers can get access to hundreds of millions
of new entrants to telecom. New services can be implemented like for instance
e-mail- and voice-mail language translation which may be feasible since exchange
of these messages is non-realtime and therefore allows delays for processing.
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 pre-selected choice on the device one
or several family members can be sent a voice message. Or after "dialling":
selecting the number of the person you want to reach, you can enter a speech
message into the device for transmission, for instance 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 IP 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 voice-message 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 /4/
: new user groups, simple to use functions and low thresholds to implement,
but less functionality at first, and no demand for it at first.
5. FEASIBILITY QUESTIONS
(1) Do members of small remote villages want such a personal
"halfway" telecom system that would allow them to exchange voice and text
messages among each-other and long distance, or would they rather wait for
a single phone box in the village centre?
An important question for this new disruptive technology proposal is:
Is 'half a glass' half full or half empty?? Are the remote villagers
interested in such partial functionality: no direct voice conversations,
no direct WWW access? Is the large scale introduction and use of PARTIAL
Phone/Internet functions in arid and remote areas welcome and useful, and
much better than 'nothing, no connection' or is such intermediary level perceived
as unacceptable, rubbish, below grade ? Or put more simply: Can and will
the villagers pay for these 'wireless local intercom' devices, would the
devices present value for them ??
(2) Can we foresee, imagine and trigger a number of completely
new "value chains" based on the rollout of the proposed Weave network?
(3) Can we get funding to publish and promote the spreading
of this idea, and encourage universities and regulatory organisations to
define standards and interfaces; and would that encourage companies to start
R&D projects to make prototypes and do field trials? Or would publication
spoil the chances for companies to establish patents? Or put more directly:
is there incentive to invest in the development, production and sale of the
devices?
We assume that the answers to these questions can only be found by starting
small scale field trials in remote areas with prototype devices. Start a
race. Like when the first PC's where constructed and tried. And at the same
time starting a rigorous standardisation process. Like the 'Groupe Speciale
Mobile" did, that defined the GSM specs and network Schnittstellen.
6. CONTEXT AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS
Content is not king, but short or long distance communication between
people is /5/6/. The value of such communication is firmly perceived and
its participants in dialogues do pay substantially for telecom and internet
services which support them. Whether this will be the case for access to
information or consumption of broadcasts remains to be seen. Messages, either
in voice- or in E-mail form, can be considered most important and valuable
to the participants. Therefore we suggest the following new definitions to
measure certain functions of "Teledensity", until now defined as the number
of voice telephony lines/terminals / 1000 inhabitants in specific geographic
areas, like nation states:
(a.) Digital Teledensity = the number of persons addressable with voice-mail
or e-mail / 1000
inhabitants in a specific area. The unit for [T]
is dimensionless.
(b.) Digital Access Capacity = the sum of the peak access capacity of
the the end-user devices in an
area expressed in [ Mbit/sec / km^2]= [R], after
Hendrik Rood. For instance PC's on Ethernet
would count for 10 Mb/s ; GSM handsets for 32 Kb/s.
(c.) Digital Network Power = the total packet per second power of
all the routers in a specific area.
The power of these routers is expressed in IP-packets/second
or pps. The unit for 'Digital
Network Power' is [pps/km^2] = [B] after Paul
Baran who first defined packet-switching.
It is a common phenomenon that if we gather statistics of items and sort
them according to size or frequency of occurance we see a "rank order graph"
which is very unequal. Like the size of cities in the world of which only
a few are very big, or the frequency of characters in a book. E and A are
very popular and for instance Q and K are occur not very often. This is what
most people know as the '80/20 Law', which is used often in Quality Control
(Pareto charts) and in coding. In popular terms we can say that success
is spread very unevenly. Such sorted rank order charts roughly follow and
inverse size distribution: the size of item N is related to 1/N. This relation
was empirically found by the linguist Zipf and is called the 'Zipf rank
order Law', which was proven by /7/ which is based on the fractal scaling
characteristics of "networks" and other types of clusters /8/.
If we were to count and chart T, R and B according to rank order for a number
of areas in (and within) countries we would also see very skewed (very unequal
teledensity, access and networkpower) graphs which would broadly relate to
1/N if N is the rank. While areas can dynamically change places in such sorted
graphs the general pattern seems to stay rather stable, as can be seen in
/3/. Which means that by for instance cross-subsidies the more or less
succesful (with lower teledensity T and R, B ) areas may change some places
but the inequality between them is not really lowered.
There is however an other solution for the very low wired-ness /9/ of
the areas in the long low tails of these graphs. We can together try to
lift the total graphs up ! That is essentially the effect that the implementation
of the proposed devices and grids in this paper may have. T, R an B of ALL
areas will go up, if we were to succeed in adding hundreds of millions of
simple communicating devices in the rural capillaries of this world.
The proposed idea is significant, feasible and can have a huge impact on the
developing countries and is recommend for further study, since like in the
human body the health of the whole 'web of life' depends very much on the
health of the micro-communication veins of this planet.
References
/1/ [van Till 2000] The TELLET Project Proposal, version 2.3, July 23
, 2000,
http://huizen.dds.nl/~vantill/divide.html
/2/ [OESO 1998]. Internet Infrastructure Indicators, report DIST/ICCP/TISP(98)/Final.
OESO:
Working Party on Telecommunications and Information
Services Policies
/3/ [Siemens, 2000] "2000 International Telecom Statistics", Yearbook
Dec. 1999; Siemens AG,
Munich, 2000
/4/ [Christensen,1997] The Innovator's Dilemma, Harvard Business School
Press, USA
/5/ [van Till, Op Hey, 1987] 'Prosumer Networks' -Broadcasting Model vs.
Communication Model-
IFIP TC 9 Conference on Social Implications of 'Home Interactive
Telematics' (HIT), in
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, June 24-27, 1987, Concerning
Home Telematics, F. van Rijn and
R. Williams (eds.); pp. 361- 367; Elsevier Science Publishers
B.V. (North-Holland) © IFIP,
1988. Also on: http://huizen.dds.nl/~vantill/prosum.html
/6/ [Odlyzko, 2001] 'Content is Not King', Andrew Odlyzko, AT&T Labs,
online magazine First
Monday, vol. 2, no. 6, Feb. 2001. URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_2/odlyzko/
or at his home page: http://www.research.att.com/~amo
The Economist mentioned it in their
Dec. 16, 2000 edition
/7/ [Mandelbrot, 1997] Fractals and Scaling in Finance - Discontinuity,
Concentration, Risk -
1997 Springer-Verlag
/8/ [van Till, 1997] 'Fractanomics' - The Issue of Scale in the
Network Economy, November 12,
1997. http://huizen.dds.nl/~vantill/fractanomics.html
/9/ [Jhunjhunwala, 2001] 'Telecom Technologies for Developing Countries';
Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala, IIT in Madras, India Conference:
Digital Infrastructures,
Vanguard Technology Transfer Institute, Dublin,
Juli 18-19, 2001