IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

and services to local subscribers. These local service partners (LSPs) set up
access centers in small towns and rural areas that provide simultaneous
Internet and telephony access to subscribers within a thirty-kilometer
(nineteen-mile) radius. 50
In India, Sparse Area Communications involve combinations of satellite
and fixed or wireless local loops, with relay stations and devices powered
by solar panels, deployed to connect even isolated communities.
When I visited the Centre for Knowledge Societies in Bangalore, a
researcher described walking for three hours up a hill to a village that was
inaccessible by road. When he arrived, he discovered that children in the
village were all computer literate—and one showed him a PowerPoint presentation.
I wasn’t sure then, or now, that finding a PowerPoint presentation
at the top of a mountain represented progress. The more heated
debate among communications designers concerns whether proprietary
systems like Soya Choupal and nLogue are compatible with the ideal of an
open-systems society.
‘‘The trick is to think and act rural,’’ advises Ashok Jhunjhunwaller, a
promoter of the electronic kiosks that are transforming connectivity in
rural India. Even if individual farmers do not own a PC or handset themselves,
85 percent of India’s seven hundred thousand villages now have
functional access to some form of connectivity. Many hundred millions of
people use the country’s million-plus public call offices (PCOs), and PCO
revenues currently account for an astonishing 25 percent of India’s total
telecom revenues. A remarkable man named Sam Pitroda came up with
this idea of ‘‘an entrepreneur in every street,’’ and since he first outlined
his vision to me in 1995, it has been has been realized in vast areas of the
country. 51 Pitroda’s PCO innovation had relatively little to do with technology;
it was mainly a business brilliant business model: first, to aggregate
demand, and second, to scale the service rapidly by involving existing local
entrepreneurs. Jhunjhunwaller is hoping to leverage similar scalability
dynamics, optimistic that kiosk systems as an enabling infrastructure
should make it possible to double average incomes in rural India from
today’s two hundred dollars per year to four hundred. 52
From Far to Deep
Locality 91
In chapter 3, I told you about the law of locality used by telecommunications
network designers to allocate capacity. As I noted earlier in this