The Journal, citing unnamed sources, said Google plans to make use of white spaces, the spectrum between TV transmissions that many governments are allocating for wireless broadband use, as well as satellites and aerial transmitters located on balloons or blimps. Finally, Google is developing low-cost devices and processors that will allow even the most resource-limited populace to take advantage of those networks.

The Journal states Google aims to connect a billion or more people to the internet through the effort. That strikes me as a big exaggeration. If Google is working with the types of technologies the Journal listed, it would be working with very limited capacities. Satellite broadband provides a finite bandwidth at extremely high cost, and aerial platforms would be constrained by their backhaul – you can’t run fiber to a tower suspended in the sky.

White spaces definitely show promise, and Google has already begun trials of the technology in South Africa. Google may even be weighing the use of white spaces in its U.S. broadband strategy. But in most countries there’s a limited amount of spectrum available for white space transmission, and in general its use is limited to rural areas where there’s less chance of it interfering with TV signals. The Journal stated that Google is focusing its efforts primarily in rural areas, but if Google really plans to connect a billion unconnected people, it would also need to hit urban centers.

Still, even if Google’s plans is a quarter as ambitious as the Journal claims, it could have an enormous impact on the developing world. In sub-Saharan Africa, 3G and 4G cellular is practically non-existent, which has led carriers like Airtel to invest heavily in cheaper unlicensed technologies like Wi-Fi, and wireline broadband available only commercial centers.

Using these technologies, Google won’t be able to provide the broadband connections we in the U.S. accustomed to at home, work or on wireless networks, but for millions of people Google could provide their first internet connections.

White space image courtesy of Flickr user Cillian Storm.

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Anyone who does more than check email on their home PC is surely going to use more than a single gigabyte in a 30-day spell, but as with its mobile service, FreedomPop is offering ways for users to earn more free data and selling premium data plans with bigger buckets of data. The bottom line though is heavy home broadband users aren’t going to sign up with FreedomPop – these plans aren’t designed for Netflix or file sharing  — but the virtual network operator is making a compelling case to casual data users, selling home connectivity for as little as $10 a month.

FreedomPop is offering four tiers of service, all of which tap into Clearwire’s WiMAX network available in 70 cities (as an MVNO FreedomPop resells Clearwire’s WiMAX capacity today and will soon resell Sprint LTE connections as well). The first tier costs nothing, giving customers 1 GB of monthly data with speeds throttled to under 1.5 Mbps. Every additional megabyte beyond the one-gig cap costs a cent, so going way over that cap could be a mighty expensive proposition. For instance, Streaming a 2 GB HD movie would cost you an additional $20.

But FreedomPop is being perfectly up front that this plan is meant for basic web surfing and email. In any case, the low-speed connection would prevent you from engaging in many bandwidth-sucking activities. As with its mobile service, FreedomPop allows free users to earn more data in 50 MB chunks by engaging the FreedomPop social network, using FreedomPop’s IP services and participating in promotions. It’s not yet clear if FreedomPop will allow customers to share their unused data with other home users like it allows mobile users to swap megabytes.

The next tier up is a $10 monthly plan, which ups the cap to 10 GB while keeping speeds limited to 1.5 Mbps. From there, the cap stays at 10 GB, but for $5 or $8 more a month you can boost speeds to 3 Mbps and 8 Mbps respectively. In the paid tiers, FreedomPop is charging a half-cent for every megabyte overage.

Even still, 10 GB isn’t much for a home connection. In July, my colleague Stacey Higginbotham took a detailed look at how different households consumed broadband, and found even sparse users of streaming services still consumed well over 10 GB each month, to say nothing of 1 GB. But once you turn off that multimedia spigot, usage drops considerably. Stacey interviewed one user in Atlanta who averaged 500 MB a month for three straight months when she took a hiatus from streamed video.

You might think of these of your grandparents’ home broadband plans (though in this day and ages, grandparents are becoming increasingly sophisticated in web communications tools), but FreedomPop seems to be positioning as a means of bridging digital divide, offering cheap, and even the possibility of free, service to people who normally couldn’t afford home broadband or just want minimal connectivity. There are still millions of dial-up users left in the U.S. It would be interesting to see if FreedomPop can reach them with this service.

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HughesNet has named the new service Gen4 and the satellite utilizes EchoStar-Hughes’ new Jupiter high-throughput technology, which expands the total capacity of the satellite to 100 Gbps. That has allowed Hughes to distribute that capacity more liberally to its customers, bumping up download speeds from 1-2 Mbps to 10-15 Mbps and upload speeds above a megabit. ViaSat launched a similarly brawny satellite last year, and began offering a $50/month 12 Mbps service in January.

Hughes service plans are comparably priced with cable broadband, ranging from $50 to $100 a month, but the satellite’s finite capacity does give the service some stiff limitations. Unlike its previous plans, these newer, faster tiers come with caps. At the low end customers are limited to 20 GB, while the upper tier taps out at 40 GB. By comparison cable operator Comcast recently raised its monthly cap from 250 GB to 300 GB a month.

What’s more, customers are restricted when they can consume that data -– on all plans, half of the monthly data bucket can only be tapped between 2 AM and 8 AM. But Hughes also seems to have done away with the old daily throttling policies that irked so many of its customers.

Before Gen4, customers technically didn’t have to deal with caps, but they were limited to daily download allotment from 250 MBs to 450 MBs. If they exceeded those caps in a 24-hour period, their connections were throttled back to dial-up speeds, returning to normal after another 24 hours. It’s not clear if Hughes is eliminating those fair-use policies completely, but it looks like customers are getting much more flexibility in how they consume their admittedly limited monthly data allocations.

Though it’s still not on par with its wireline counterparts, satellite broadband has made leaps in last year as a new generation of equipment has gone into orbit. That’s led to several new services that have bumped up the speeds available to a large swathe of the American hinterland and other underserved areas where DSL and cable aren’t options. In addition to ViaSat’s Exede and HughesNet’s Gen4, Dish Network has bought capacity from both companies, allowing it to sell a broadband service called DishNet in areas ViaSat and Hughes’ respective birds don’t cover.

Improved satellite technologies have also expanded broadband access beyond rural homes and business. ViaSat’s satellite will power JetBlue’s forthcoming in-flight Wi-Fi service, significantly boosting the speeds available to passengers while drastically lowering the cost of delivering that data. In three years, Iridium will begin launching a new constellation of 66 satellites into low-Earth orbit, which will be able to supply 8 Mbps connections not just to homes in the Midwest farmlands but to any point on the globe.

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But will it be enough to be profitable? Dave Burstein, a telecoms reporter and analyst, estimates that it would need a take rate of between 20 and 30 percent to be profitable.

There are still two days left for residents to sign up for the service — the deadline is midnight on Sunday, and Google will then determine which areas get fiber first, based in part on the number and density of signups. I made my count around noon PT, so that number is subject to change. Once Google announces the lucky fiberhoods, it will send out trucks to connect those homes to the Google network. At the July launch of Google Fiber, Milo Medin — the VP of access technologies for Google — estimated that once the neighborhoods are chosen, and Google sends out its technicians to the neighborhoods, residents there might have the service in about a week.

That’s exciting for the residents of Dubs Dread and Greenway Fields, where currently 41 percent and 50 percent of the homes in the fiberhood have signed up for Google’s $70-a-month Internet or $120-a-month TV and Internet service. Google also has a free 5 Mbps service if residents pay the $300 connection fee, either up front or spread out over two one year at $25 a month.

Milo Medin at the Google Fiber announcement.

However, there are plenty of residents in Kansas City who are concerned about how few lower-income neighborhoods are making the cut. The Kansas City Star has published several letters from people noting that the Google offering isn’t helping bridge the digital divide, with some writers pointing out that in some areas people predominantly rent their homes, and their landlords aren’t choosing to connect, and others firing off against Google’s tactics.

Of most concern to many of these residents is that Google will also connect community institutions such as fire stations, libraries, parks and schools with its service if enough people sign up. For residents of neighborhoods who can’t meet the threshold to get a gig in their fiberhood, the loss of not only their chance to get a gig connection at home but also the chance to connect their schools, rankles.

It’s been enough of a problem that Google last Friday said it would adjust some of the thresholds in certain neighborhoods based on a reworking of the number of residents and other information. The Kansas City star also reports that Google is sending people out to knock on doors to try to get residents in those neighborhoods to sign up.

The other aspect that’s likely worrying residents is that if they don’t pre-register before Sunday, it’s unclear when they might get the Google Fiber service if they decide they want it later. A Google spokeswoman said that Google would offer residents in fiberhoods that have already qualified another opportunity to get service at a later point in time, but that she didn’t have details yet on how that process would work.

And while this fits in with the way Google is trying to lower the cost of deploying broadband, it is not the most familiar or customer-friendly way to offer a service. Before the Internet, it’s hard to imagine very many situations where you would have to get enough of your friends to participate before you get to buy tickets to a movie or to get your teeth cleaned. And try telling people that unless they pre-order a book on Amazon the publisher won’t sell that book to them — until it became convenient again for the publishing company — and most people would balk.

Yet these models do work in certain industries, such as buying a home in a planned development or even trying to snag a deal at a pop up retail store. Google is just bringing it to communications which means residents are having to adjust to a new reality.

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We tend to associate femtocells with spot coverage: Having trouble getting a signal inside your house? Well, call up your carrier and chances are it will offer you a femtocell, delivering a private signal in your home. But RascomStar is taking that same concept and extending to entire villages and towns in the Congo. This summer, it’s deploying a pilot network of 50 miniature base stations — supplied by U.K. femto vendor ip.access — in communities all over the Congo. RascomStar plans to expand the pilot into a larger-scale commercial launch in 2013, as well as extend it to at least 10 other African countries.

RascomStar’s satellite network plays a critical role here. Mobile communications may use the airwaves to deliver their voice and data payloads, but they rely on wireline networks to take over once those transmissions hit the tower. Since telecom infrastructure is scarce and far between in remote communities, RascomStar is contracting with ViaSat to backhaul those femtos, bouncing their transmissions off orbital satellites back to the RascomStar’s core network in Brazzaville, the capital of the Congo.

Operators all over the world use satellite to backhaul tower sites in remote locales, but the combination of femtocells with satellite adds a new twist. Femtocells and picocells are designed to (BE?) self-configuring devices that can be installed much like you would INSTALL a consumer Wi-Fi access point.

If RascomStar takes this trial to its logical conclusion, it could have a big liberating effect on network deployment. Rather than send engineers, technicians and trucks to individual communities to build towers and install costly base stations, a carrier could practically build remote networks via mail, shipping femtos out to isolated communities where someone with a basic technical knowledge could get a wireless network up in running in a matter of hours.

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Their success faces two challenges: a lack of sufficient broadband infrastructure in some low-income areas and broadband adoption efforts that miss the mark because policymakers don’t understand what leads to success. Fortunately, these issues can be addressed. Once we accept that success depends on how we spend that stimulus funding and what stakeholders expect (hope) to achieve.

A recent Forbes article illustrates the challenge we have when well-intentioned people don’t fully understand a particular market or that market’s broadband needs. Back in December, Forbes’ columnist Gene Marks told the world how he’d handle life and technology “If I Was a Poor Black Kid.” Quite a national backlash erupted.

Forgetting for a minute the tone of the piece (which was grating not just to those of us from the ‘hood), blood pressures spiked too because Marks assumed several things about a poor urban kid’s access to technology that are not true. If policymakers and others in positions of influence who read Forbes carry similar assumptions, good luck trying to bridge that divide. Poor kids of every color will lose out.

Better infrastructure is Job 1

Too many folks take as gospel that a good marketing campaign will increase broadband adoption in low-income communities. Use just the right spin, price point or magazine column, and poor folks will flock to the digital promise land.

An in-depth qualitative survey report commissioned by the FCC and released in 2010 by the Social Science Research Council reveals that lack of relevancy is not an issue, “even among respondents with profound histories of marginalization. No one needed to be convinced of the importance of Internet use or of the value of broadband adoption in the home.”

Poor kids in Philadelphia take little comfort in Marks’ advice when they can’t buy Internet access above DSL speed even if they can afford it. Brigitte Daniel, EVP of Philadelphia private cable provider Wilco Electronic Systems, Inc. applied for stimulus funding for infrastructure because at least 10,000 low-income residences fit into this category. Service providers can’t make a business case for building highspeed networks in those neighborhoods. “Philadelphia isn’t the only urban city facing this dilemma,” she says. “I’ve spoken with providers in other cities who have documented similar issues.”

Internet service may be advertised as available citywide in large metro areas. However, there’s no financial incentive to build infrastructure where ROI prospects are poor.  Furthermore, when infrastructure there deteriorates or becomes obsolete, potential ROI is too low to justify upgrading. Computing centers are as great as the infrastructure that supports them.

Leonard Salcido is Senior Art Director for Change Agent Productions, located in one of Long Beach, CA’s poorest neighborhoods. They teach inner city kids digital media skills, plus provide consulting services to clients. They rely on 3 Mbps over bonded T1 lines. Even though Verizon’s central office is only a block away and Leonard’s organization is a $400,000 enterprise, after multiple attempts they still can’t get Verizon to sell them the same FiOs service Verizon offers Long Beach’s more affluent neighborhoods.

Parents in 10 million families work for wages so low they are still poor. Subsequently they likely have to pay more to get less broadband, which often means they get no broadband. A survey of the Washington, DC area released in 2011 by American University revealed that low income neighborhoods paid three times more ($31.17 per megabit/second) than wealthy neighborhoods ($9.58 per megabit per second). These findings are similar to a Department of Commerce national survey report.

Libraries are key to adoption. However, 76 percent of economic development professionals recently surveyed said broadband’s main impact on individuals’ economic development comes through facilitating home-based businesses, reaching higher education levels and improving job skills. Spend time in libraries in a few communities (which I’ve done), and you discover there can be too few workstations, not enough bandwidth and not enough branches open at times when many kids and most working parents could pursue these goals. Urban city libraries need the same direct link to fiber that rural libraries are receiving via broadband stimulus funds.

This way out

Perhaps Marks could write a piece titled “If I Were President/Governor/Congressman..” and offer sage advice on how to unite the government and private sectors to replicate Washington, DC’s good gigabit fortune in other urban areas, as Kansas City is doing with Google. Then thousands of poor kids could plug their computers into Net connections fast enough to access those wonderful free Web sites Marks recommends. Libraries could become better digital resources.

Also tell us how as an elected leader  you would overcome critics of every attempt to close the divide because they fervently believe poor people are lazy, undeserving or some other insidious stereotype. Is this easy?  No it’s not.  It’s hard. Let me suggest a follow-up column. “If I were in a position of influence, I’d learn about organizations such as the Long Beach YMCA Youth Institute and challenge critics to replicate their success in other cities.”

Each year 200 low-income high school, 300 middle school and 2000 elementary school kids receive the Institute’s hands-on long-term training that builds business-level proficiency in a range of digital media skills. Students become technology instructors, print publication editors and producers of original movie and music while in school, paid interns upon leaving school and for some, managers and staff at the Institute. The Institute’s Change Agent Productions provides a range of online digital media consulting services to clients around the country.

Together, both organizations require a minimum 20 Mbps Internet connections to operate with average productivity, bandwidth currently beyond their reach. With access to a network such as Washington, DC just launched they could train more kids, service more clients and turn more lives around. The network could sustain dozens of similar high-bandwidth operations. Thousands of students could access and manage those multimedia capabilities from their homes. Some could start Web-based home businesses.

Critics blinded by stereotypes only see broadband in low-income neighborhoods as “my tax dollars supporting poor people wasting time.” These communities’ stakeholders see a digital engine to tech-driven economic self-reliance. The smart money should be on economic self reliance.

Craig Settles is a broadband industry analyst and consultant who helps organizations develop effective broadband strategies. Listen to his radio show (Gigabit Nation) and follow him on Twitter (@cjsettles) or via his blog.

Image courtesy of Flickr user See-ming Lee 李思明 SML.

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• People power will come to life. Advances in technology will allow us to trap the kinetic energy  generated (and wasted) from walking, jogging, bicycling and even from water flowing through pipes. A bicycle charging your iPhone? There’s nothing wrong with that, though I think it might be a while before we see this actually become a mainstream practice.
• You will never need a password again. Biometrics will finally replace the password, and with that, redefine the phrase “hack.” Jokes aside, IBM believes multi-factor biometrics will become pervasive. ”Biometric data – facial definitions, retinal scans and voice files – will be composited through software to build your DNA-unique online password.” Just based on the increasing hours we spend online, I would say we need solutions such as the ones proposed by IBM labs to come to market ASAP.
• Mind reading is no longer science fiction. Scientists are working on headsets with sensors that can read brain activity and recognize facial expressions, excitement and more without needing any physical inputs from the wearer. “Within [five] years, we will begin to see early applications of this technology in the gaming and entertainment industry,” IBM notes. It will also be good for folks who have suffered from strokes and have brain disorders. Personally, I’m not sure this is commercially viable within the stated five years.
• The digital divide will cease to exist. Mobile phones will make it easy for even the poorest of poor to get connected. In the U.S. and other parts of the world, this is already happening.
• Junk mail will become priority mail. ”In five years, unsolicited advertisements may feel so personalized and relevant it may seem that spam is dead. At the same time, spam filters will be so precise you’ll never be bothered by unwanted sales pitches again,” notes IBM. I have just one thing to say about this prediction: OMG!

Is IBM any good at this prediction stuff?

New predictions aside, IBM’s track record of predictions over past five years has been somewhat mixed. Let’s take a step back to 2006 and look at its predictions:

• We will be able to access healthcare remotely, from just about anywhere in the world.
• Real-time speech translation—once a vision only in science fiction—will become the norm.
• There will be a 3-D Internet.
• Technologies the size of a few atoms will address areas of environmental importance.
• Our mobile phones will start to read our minds.

Remote healthcare is a reality, but real-time speech translation is well, not quite as real. The 3-D Internet: We’re still waiting for that, but those mobile phones are becoming awfully smart. As I said, it’s mixed in its predictions. In 2007, IBM correctly predicted driving would be assisted by software and your phones would become “your wallet, ticket broker, concierge, bank, shopping buddy and more.” But that was right after iPhone launched.

As another example, in 2009, IBM predicted city buildings would “sense and respond” like living organisms. That sensor-based future is finally unfolding two years later. That same year, they predicted cars and buses would run on hydrogen and biofuels. Well, it’s half-true. We have some places where some buses and some cars are running on biofuels. However, their prediction that cities will develop a healthier immune system due to connectedness is quite far from reality. Although we still have a little more than two years to go before we can say IBM got those wrong.

What’s the bottom line?

IBM’s 5 in 5 makes a nice cheat sheet to keep an eye on the future and also focus on key trends that might go big. I can’t wait for the 2012 edition.

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It argues that issues such as packet blocking, different access technologies, broadband caps and cost all can widen the digital divide even if two areas have the FCC-sanctioned definition of broadband as offering 4 Mbps or more. For example, my uncapped 14 Mbps down cable connection for $45 delivers a much different experience than a 10 Mbps LTE connection for someone in College Station, Texas about 80 miles away. How so? My bandwidth isn’t capped and the price is fixed no matter how much I use it, while an LTE connection would cost $50 for 5 GB or $80 for 10 GB. And without wireless network neutrality rules, certain services could be blocked on the LTE connection. Both homes might have broadband, but they are very different connections.

But outside of that well-explored divide, the report charts a more pernicious problem associated with the web — namely the use of packet inspection to segment out certain bits of data for special pricing or for special treatment of the (positive or negative sort). This changes IP services that are all equal into unequal bits that ISPs can now control and charge extra for. I’m not sure I can buy 100 percent into the implicit argument that all packets are equal, when some packets (such as those for streaming video or voice packets) must be delivered in specific order that can be more challenging to maintain over a network, but I do think the trend toward segregating out applications and services is a dangerous one. From the report:

Metcalfe’s law assumes that a new network participant gains the benefits gleaned from other members. As we’re seeing today, however, command-and-control networks sustained by business models based on an all-powerful network operator are bleeding off these networks’ exponential benefits. Whereas such companies stand to gain enormous profits by commoditizing every form of communication possible, the inefficiencies these practices cause (in terms of lowered information flow, network congestion over centralized relay points, greatly lessened innovation at network edges, and so on) are coming at edge-users’ expense. Better technologies exist that would dramatically lower communication costs, increase adoption rates, and fuel new service and application development, and that are synergistic with pre-existing infrastructure.

The New American report looks at Wi-Fi and other technologies to set up local networks. It also goes into the role that devices that are controlled by OS manufacturers or hardware makers play in this lessening of both freedom and the widening of a digital divide between the web someone experiences on an Android phone and what someone experiences on an iPhone (or worse! a feature phone). All in all, it’s worth reading and then rereading as we consider broadband policy in the U.S. and the development of technologies that can help keep access available for all, but also enable everyone to have the same web experience.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Tycho Moon

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Among smartphone users, 87 percent said they used the Internet or email on their device including 68 percent who say they do it on a daily basis. Twenty-five percent said they go online primarily with their phones rather than on a computer. That’s in part because one-third of these respondents come from cell-only households that don’t have home computers. This is particularly true among smartphone owners under the age of 30, non-white smartphone users, and smartphone owners with relatively low income and education levels.

The Pew study also found that 35 percent of American adults have a smartphone, with smartphone adoption strongest among richer households as well as with younger users. Almost six in 10 (59 percent) smartphone users come from households with $75,000 or more in income, while 58 percent of American cell phone owners between the ages of 25 and 34 own a smartphone, and 48 percent of people ages 18-24 have a smartphone. Among African-Americans and Latinos, 44 percent own a smartphone. Android was particularly popular among African-Americans, with 26 percent of all cell phone owners in this group using an Android device, far ahead of whites and Latinos. Overall, Android led the way with 15 percent of all cell phones owners, followed by the iPhone and BlackBerry at 10 percent each. The Pew results are based on a national telephone survey of 2,277 adults conducted between April 26 and May 22, 2011.

The survey results are interesting for a couple of reasons. Some imagine the smartphone market as if it were solely a tech geek or early adopter phenomenon that is spilling over now to middle class mainstream users. But for many users, who sometimes don’t have the income for pricier smartphones and data plans, they’re still turning to the devices because it’s their primary link to the Internet. And the devices are extremely popular with minority groups who see a lot of value in smartphones. It’s a big opportunity I’m not sure marketers completely understand: The smartphone is bridging the digital divide for some communities, helping them leap ahead. Cheaper pricing and more affordable data plans can help encourage this trend.

The other interesting thing is that with so many people turning to the Internet from their smartphones, websites should consider upping their mobile game. Many sites are still oriented toward desktop users and assume that consumers have larger screens and technology like Flash to navigate through content. But I believe there are missed opportunities in websites that aren’t optimized for mobile, which can lose customers and possible transactions because they’re not geared for mobile users with more limited screen real estate. Google, for example, recently started offering free mobile Google Sites templates to businesses interested in building out their mobile presence. Google said it found that 61 percent of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site they had trouble accessing from their phone, and 40 percent go to a competitor’s site. Getting up-to-speed on mobile is becoming less of an option and more of an imperative for companies trying to do business on the web.

With so many people turning to smartphones and many of them primarily using them for Internet access, these are just some of the implications that need to be considered. We’re on our way toward a smartphone majority soon, but it’s unfolding in interesting ways that can provide some new opportunities for those paying attention.

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“In developing countries, BitTorrent is almost unusable on the typically low-bandwidth dialup connections,” the researchers behind BitMate write on their website. And no, we’re not just talking about the fact that it’s impossible to download a Blu-ray rip over a 56k connection. The problem for dial-up users is that BitTorrent is designed to be based on fair and equal exchange of data. If you upload a lot, you’re also rewarded with high download speeds. That helps to bring overall download speeds up since it forces clients not to be selfish — but the flip side is that users with very slow connections simply get shut out.

To change that, the team came up with the idea to cluster low-bandwidth clients: Users on dial-up networks don’t even try to upload data to someone with a fast cable connection and instead simply send those bits to each other. They’re also much more selective in their downloading behavior, thus avoiding duplicate downloads and other unnecessary downloads from high-bandwidth peers. And finally, they avoid cross-ISP traffic, which can be another big bottleneck in countries with a less-developed Internet infrastructure.

BitMate is the result of two years of development, I was told by the project’s lead Umar Saif, who is an associate professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. Saif told me via email that his team has seen download performance improvements of up to 70 percent during the eight months of testing that preceded this week’s release.

The BitMate client is part of Saif’s work with the Dritte initiative, a project that aims to spur development through technology. “BitMate… provides a level playing field for the Internet users in the developing-world,” he explained, adding: “If you give people a means to efficiently access data, you’d be surprised what they can do with it!”

However, the research that goes into projects like BitMate could also help us to advance technologies in the developed world. Muneeb Ali, a PhD student at Princeton University who has been involved with Dritte since its early days, told me via email:

“Most of the research in developing regions involves working with greater constraints like unreliable power, slow connectivity, limited computational resources, and so on. The research done in these constrained environments can certainly benefit other areas, where a subset of these constraints exist.”

In other words: Be it mobile networks or near-field communications, we often face challenges when we try to bring existing applications to new environments. Taking a good look at the core design principles and assumptions that come with these technologies could help to make them work in these new environments without breaking them for the rest of us.

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