Just happened to see this on the web about
building high-speed wireless in Afghanistan out of garbage.
The MIT group involved in the project also has
a blog entry which gives an overview of some aspects of the project that match nicely with our secrets of social innovation.
There are several amazing things here, in case you’re also too excited to notice, they are:
1. the Afghans understand what’s going on technically
2. they aren’t allowing material or logistics impede forward progress and instead are improvising with what they can get their hands on
3. the reflector was made with not only “locally available” materials but using pre-used material (meaning not new, perfect stock materials)
4. H and R are sufficiently motivated not just by their own internet connection but the community mesh in general and are really putting in time and effort
5. they took pictures and wrote us a summary! With no prodding!
6. while it’s not “the best signal possible”, that antenna is getting -77dB to -71dB which is REALLY CLOSE to what our machine cut antenna gets at that range. Oh, wait, that’s slightly bad news for the computer controlled machines. But awesome for our FabFi team!
7. did I mention they dreamed this up themselves?
This is more proof that sometimes you don’t need an optimal, perfectly engineered (expensive) solution. What you need is something that works, now. That oil can reflector is no where the best signal that they could “possibly get”, but what they are getting is GOOGLE (in Hameed’s words)!
Exciting!
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