Mobiles and the Urban Poor  

Core77 points to a Bruce Sterling talk at the Lift Asia conference on urban poverty that is replacing rural poverty as the world's peasants migrate to the cities and what mobile phone networks mean for them ("there is no cell phone divide" between rich and poor) - Mobiles and the Urban Poor.

Bruce Sterling's talk at LIFT Asia, about how the poor are moving to cities, using mobile technologies to access services like payment, was impressive.

But what made it simply brilliant was his discussion on how the future collapse of North Korea will present South Korea with a challenge of enormous proportions, and how mobile technology and mobile payment can be part of the solution:

"When you are working on cell phones, when you are working on the web, when you are working on electronic money and payment systems, you need to think: What if my user is a North-Korean? How would I do this differently if I knew my user was from Pyongyang, that his regime had collapsed, that his economy had collapsed, he was completely bewildered, and he had never seen a cell phone or a computer in his life, and I intended to make him a productive and happy fellow citizen in ten years, what kind of technology would I give that person, what kind of trading system, economic system?"

According to LIFT organiser Laurent Haug he moved a large part of the audience, leaving a strange silence in the room as they came out for the break.

The Daily Tech reports on plans to bring high speed internet access to the developing world - Google Funds Startup to Bring Cheap Satellite Internet to 3 Billion People. The article calls this "cheap" access, but the pricing terminology is confusing - $500 per megabit per month doesn't sound cheap to me.

New company will use unique scheme to dramatically cut costs, deliver high speed internet to remote locations

While over 80 percent of Americans are online, broadband adoption is growing slower than expected. The problem stems from the fiber optics business. Buoyed by high demand and exuberance, fiber optic companies laid down high speed cables across the oceans to support the data demands of hungry 3G and cable internet networks.

After these cables were laid the demand slacked off predictably, leaving the fiber optic companies with little revenue and high debts. Many were bought up by larger companies and consolidated. In the aftermath, over 3 billion people were left without access to high speed networks and new installations reduced to a crawl. The only alternative was geosatellite, which costs a whopping $4,000 USD per megabit per month.

Now a new company is seeking to change that. The company, O3B, draws its name from the phrase "other 3 billion" to describe the world's population with no internet coverage. The company, located in U.K.'s Channel Islands, is building 16 satellites thanks to $65M USD in funding from HSBC Principal Investments, a private equity provider; Liberty Global, a service provider for phone and Internet access in 15 countries; and Google. ...

O3B's unique plan is to launch medium-earth orbit (MEO) satellites, which orbit at 5,000 miles and only have 120 millisecond latency and are less expensive compared to geosatellites which orbit at 22,500 miles, have a latency of up to 600 milliseconds, and cost more. The new satellites are predicted to cut costs down to around $500 USD per megabit per month, much more affordable.