There are schools in Tanzania where the kids walk five miles to school - and when they get there they have no electricity and no computers.  Brian DeLacey learned of this through Bill Buck of Genesi USA, inc (https://www.genesi-usa.com/).

One of the school locations is near Bukoba, Tanzania (Google Maps link: http://goo.gl/maps/1uam).

Brian's personal interests include helping schools with technology, as well as potential applications of solar energy, low power / relocatable computing, and wireless communications. In 2008, with a team from the Cambridge/Boston area, Brian organized the first SolarWirelessMile (solarwirelessmile.com) and has since taken a more global focus with solarwirelesskm.com.

Bill Buck and Genesi Inc. sponsored a prototype consisting of three major components:

* a relocatable solar power station
* battery powered, radio base wireless outpost
* a network environment with a rich WEB experience (using their own local web using domain names) even without full internet acces.

The goals included making it affordable, rely on off-the-shelf components as much as possible, and package it as a kit.

This solution could provide students/people in Tanzania preloaded websites with content and applications for education, community, civic, health, telemedecine and open up new possibilities for remote / wireless digital communications.

The computing hardware is based on Genesi's energy efficient and very capable Smarttop and Smartbook platforms, which Brian discovered during his early research into energy efficient computers. The Smarttop and Smartbook are built around Freescale processors. The annual Freescale Technology Forum is in San Antonio from 20-23 June and Genesi will introduce this new Smartbook at that time, based on the modern i.MX535. Genesi is a Silver Sponsor and Exhibitor at the event: www.freescale.com/ftf. 

Project Participants:
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Members of http://www.uiwicc.org/ and Genesi will travel to Tanzania in June with the prototype. The current plan is to deploy a pilot installation in Tanzania during June 2011.

Other related project interests include the work of Janice Lathen - http://poweringpotential.org/

Some planned Tanzanian end-users of Genesi's technology:
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Educational - http://www.poweringpotential.org/index.html (14 Smarttops)

Future Developments
===================

I'd like to find a simple, reliable, web standard way to periodically synchronize internets that are periodically and predictably disconnected. Towards this end I'm exploring rsync, DNS replication, and discussions in threads over here -http://groups.google.com/group/comp.protocols.dns.bind/browse_thread/thread/17c680e2dfdb97cc

Existing projects in this generic area include:

Wizzy Digital Courier - http://www.wizzy.org.za/

Supporting Material:
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Photos
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Videos 
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min:sec

0:48 - Genesi Give it a Try (short on solar) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StFuhZg0Row

4:29 - Solar Assembly in 25 minutes (time lapse) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4w5dQQvxlcA

5:17 - LoNet (wireless / radio setup) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy55acm-7x0&feature=related


0:34 - Smarttop short startup / demo - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj5hTkZSTBA

3:44 - Smoot Outpost (putting together battery/solar + local internet + radio broadcat) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLzJ_MLa2_k

This is a short list of what we used in the smootoutpost video:

Our "base station" was located in the "garden area" of MIT's solar concentrator. We set up one Genesi Smarttop running DHCP, BIND/DNS, a webserver and a sample web application. This was our main network brain - our central server. We had a second Genesi Smarttop running as a client / browser system attached to the same local area network, both via ethernet cabling and WiFi. These devices shared a Vizio HDMI display. All these devices were powered by a 12V battery (rechargeable by solar.) The local internet ran through a DLink switch and was accessible by two wireless APs.  We then connected this local area network to a Ubiquiti radio base station via a power over ethernet cable ("POE").  I envision this "garden gear" as a base station sitting in/atop a government building, NGO, medical facility, or police office in Tanzania. In addition to providing centralized applications - e.g. healthcare, safety, weather, administration - this becomes a potential link to the full WWW.

We then transported our "outpost" wireless station more than a kilometer away to the Boston side of the Charles River. We positioned the outpost atop the Harvard Bridge, with commanding views of the MIT dome to the West and the towering heights of downtown Boston to the east. The outpost antenna pointed back in the direction of the MIT solar concentrator. Without any precise positioning except visual line of sight, we quickly obtained a good 5 GHz radio signal and network connection between the "outpost" and the "base station". (The antenna we were using at the base station radiated the signal out 120 degrees.)

About 15 minutes after walking onto the bridge, we had a browser connected to the webserver (running on a Genesi box) across the river and over a kilometer away. 

We made use of multiple types of netbooks in this testing. (The one-way distances the signal traveled were approximately 680 Smoots, 1.16 kilometers, or 3/4 of a mile. Multiply that by 2 for the round trip!) We had the radio's power turned way down; we easily could attain longer distances with this caliber of equipment. The connection speed at this distance was as good as having two antenna right next to each other. We had zero packet loss and highly responsive applications. 

Other Links
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Related program on Charlie Rose - Marissa Mayer (Google) and Susan Mashibe (US-educated founder of Tanjet in Tanzania)


Throughout Tanzania, internet penetration remains low - http://2009.inwent-iij-lab.org/?p=106. This has been the main motivaion behind my work on this project.

Prolonged droughts have severely impacted the supply of hydro-electric production of electricity - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanzania

Tanzania ranks about the middle of the list of countries relative to electricity produced and consumed - https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/tz.html

Special Thanks
==============

Michael M., Kurt, Stephen, Lisa, Lynn, Andrew, Jen, Sage, MIT, Thomas, Bill and Raquel, Matt, Dave, Joe, Rick, SimpleRay, Pasadena Networks, Grape Solar, Marsee and O'Reilly Media, Nadja and TaylorAndFrancis, Pearson Publishing, and many, many more.