8/13/2019 A Guerilla Mobile Network Springs Up in Indonesia _
MIT Technology Review
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Credit: Photo courtesy of Kurtis Heimerl
Tagged: Communications, Vanu, Microsoft Research India
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available spectrumwithout needing a lot of money upfront for a
licensewill be crucial to
expanding the concept, Heimerl adds.
Ed Cutrell, who manages a research group on technology for
emerging markets at Microsofts India
research lab, says Heimerls work is a key demonstration of how
to bring connectivity to the most
remote areas in the world. His research is opening up the
possibility to connect millions of people
who are just too remote and scattered to be of interest to
telecoms, Cutrell says.
The system includes some elements of redneck engineering,
Cutrell says. They just hauled a
base station up into the tree and roped it in, and theyve got a
signal.
But it also features some technical novelties. One is a
power-saving strategy that lets users govern
how much the system is used at night. Normally, a
telecommunications company operating a base
station in a remote area would save energy costs (often from
diesel fuel) by shutting down the
system overnight.
The UC Berkeley groups system is kept in a low-power sleep mode
at night, and users can switch
it on. All they have to do to make a call or send a message in
the middle of the night is visit one of
three wireless gadgets mounted in central locations, and hit a
red button to wake up the base
station. Incoming calls or text messages also wake up the
system, but the call or message is
delayed 20 seconds while the power amplifier kicks on, allowing
a signal to become available. This
provides 24-hour availability while saving about half the power
compared to leaving the system on
all night, Heimerl says.
Around the world, hundreds of millions of people, mostly in
remote rural areas, lack even basic
cellular coverage. And major wireless carrierssuch as Indonesias
Telkomselare often unable to
make a business case for serving such areas. In some cases,
super-efficient base stations can help
with the economics, particularly in reducing power consumption
(see A Tiny Cell-Phone
Transmitter Takes Root in Rural Africa). But where companies
cant see a business case, the only
solution we found was to let the communities do the coverage
themselves, Heimerl says. He is
already planning projects in other areas, including the
Philippines and Pakistan.
MIT Technology Review 2014 v1.13.05.10
