One of the most interesting problems facing the technology industry is getting the billions of unconnected people around the world online.
Facebook and Google think aerial drones are the answer, with plans to put hundreds or thousands of flying robots in the atmosphere to beam down data rather than building expensive infrastructure in remote regions. Given the periodic updates we get on their progress, it seems both solutions are more than a crazy pipe dream.
But they’re also not quite ready for full deployment and won’t be for some time. In the meantime, startups and nonprofits have tried to find ways to send data over the systems that have been built out in emerging markets, including SMS (which has already been adapted for uses beyond simple text messaging, like payments).
Pangea, which presented onstage at Disrupt NY, offered a solution for bringing the unconnected billions online that will sound familiar to those of us who were on the web before broadband and mobile became the norm: sending data over the infrastructure used to send voice calls.
While the concept is fundamentally the same as good-ol’ dial-up, the implementation is far more intricate. Telcos with landlines expected their customers to sometimes use their lines to connect to the Internet, whereas mobile carriers try to cut out anything that isn’t a human voice.
So Pangea took the hard route and figured out how they could deploy data within those confines. Their method involves turning data into a sound wave, modulating it to sound like a human voice to a telco’s backend, and then reverting it back to data on the end-user’s device.
Every time you want to send an email or check Twitter, it’ll make a quick (~10 seconds) call and transfer the requested data at up to 64 kilobytes per second. Given the slow speeds, Pangea is only for text for now, but co-founder Vlad Iuhas says that down the road, it’ll offer the full Android experience, albeit a lot slower than most users in markets with data infrastructure are used to.
Getting access through Pangea requires installing an app on a feature phone or Android device, which is problematic when the market you’re going after doesn’t have access to data in the first place. The startup’s immediate solution is to have an initial user who commutes to a major city download the app over data, then send the app to other residents of their village or town over Bluetooth.
Iuhas hopes that carriers in Africa, Asia and Latin America will one day pre-install their app on phones (and maybe even pay for usage). The company plans to begin rolling out service in Nigeria this summer, working in concert with one of Africa’s largest wireless carriers. If that goes well, the company plans to deploy across the continent in the not-too-distant future.
from TechCrunch http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/EX1kvZaDYUI/
via IFTTT
Сообщения
0 коммент.:
Отправить комментарий