Bringing WiFi to Rural Poor

Eric Brewer draws a line in the sand, one that stretches clear across the Sahara Desert from Gibraltar south to Ghana. It represents his vision for a wireless backbone network that could bring a better life to rural Africa using the same WiFi technology popular in San Francisco cafes.

 

"I want people to think big," said Brewer, a professor of computer science at U.C. Berkeley who has spent the last five years seeking ways to use WiFi to improve life in rural communities in the developing world.

 

Brewer shared his views and experiences in a keynote to a group of fellow academics and engineers at an IEEE workshop on wireless mesh networks. He describes his work in this video.

 

The entire article on EE Times can be found here.

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