Afghanistan's Amazing DIY Internet

Sehr beeindruckend - Internet für alle, ohne staatliche Regulierungen, auf Basis von FabFi...

The Afghan city of Jalalabad has a high-speed Internet network whose main components are built out of trash found locally. Aid workers, mostly from the United States, are using the provincial city in Afghanistan's far east as a pilot site for a project called FabFi.

It's a broadband apart from the covert, subversive "Internet in a suitcase" and stealth broadband networks being sponspored by the U.S., aimed at empowering dissidents, but the goal isn't so different: bringing high-speed onilne access to the world's most remote places.

Residents can build a FabFi node out of approximately $60 worth of everyday items such as boards, wires, plastic tubs, and cans that will serve a whole community at once. While it sounds like science fiction, FabFi could have important ramifications for entire swaths of the world that lack conventional broadband.

Afghanistan is also a focal point for One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), which is currently working in Jalalabad, Kabul, Herat and Kandahar. OLPC's Samuel Klein noted that locals are being introduced to Wikipedia for the first time, which resulted in an amazing image of an Afghan family viewing Wikipedia on OLPC laptops. Wikipedia has a robust Pashto-language version.

... read more on fast company.
via mr.honk.