Green Wi-Fi for developing countries
I’ve posted about the idea of a solar-powered Wi-Fi system before, but a couple of guys from Sun Microsystems have decided to focus on a commercial product ideal for the developing world. Their not-for-profit company, Green Wi-Fi, “has developed a low-cost, solar-powered, standardized WiFi access solution that runs out-of-the-box with no systems integration or power requirements. All that is required is a single source of broadband access,” according to the company. It says its WiFi nodes can be deployed on rooftops to form a “self-healing network” virtual 802.11b/g grid.
This isn’t a new concept. An engineer at Nortel Networks, a developer of so-called mesh network products, told me two years ago that the company was using solar to power its Wi-Fi nodes for network buildouts in Africa and other places. These things don’t require much power, so a small off-the-shell solar cell does the trick.
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
