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Comment by petke | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit sad about this. Whatever its faults. This would surely have driven down the cost to send a messages between people, low enough that very poor people could do it also.

There are plenty of poor people who cant afford to make mobile phone calls or send sms messages. With this they would at least had some way to do so.

Say there is one mobile phone in the village (powered by say a solar panel). A person could just borrow that or rent it for a moment, to send some important message. Say to find out what the price of milk is today at the market in the next village. (If they cant read or write then they could get that one kid that can, to do it for them)

Small thing like this could create all kinds of new opportunities.

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I think you underestimate how affordable and widespread mobile communication is.

From my observations in Kumasi, Ghana and Kabul, Afghanistan (where I worked for a telco) having a basic cellphone and a cheap top-up plan is nearly universal. Prepaid SIM cards are sold on almost every street corner and the Facebook-enabled bundles are extremely popular.

After food, water, and clothing, family and business communications are the next most important need.

I hope you are right.

I would make a great ted talk. How cheap mobile communication is changing life in remote villages.

From own limited experience, I was struck by how expensive slow internet access was in the third world around 2008 (two years backpacking South America and South East Asia). The average local could not afford it. I could barely afford it. I remember for instance a Internet cafe in a small mountain town in Bolivia charged about $10 dollars an hour in 2008 (I guess it was internet by satellite).

I hope things have changed. Any internet access (however limited) would make a big difference to the poor.

For what it's worth, I experienced the same thing in Burkina Faso more than three years ago. It is far poorer than Ghana and pretty much everyone living in a town had a cell phone (or two or three) and used top-up services. Even in remote villages, usually at least one person would have a cell phone to share in places where network was available.

It already is a great TED talk. I forget by who.

The punchline is that when yo look at earth from space, the places that don't have visible (artificial) light are the places where innovation is happening, leapfrogging legacy wired infrastructure.

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