Villages and small towns in Mexico have a rough deal, the privatisations of government monopolies during the 1990s meant most of them were cut off from the telecommunications networks rolled out at the turn of the century.
It’s taken a while for engineers to find a way to figure out an open source alternative to cellular base stations but now they have and it promises to change the model of economic development in poor regions.
Wired describes how community groups are bringing mobile communications to the poorer and more remote parts of Mexico.
The rollout of Open BSC is an example of how small scale operations can compliment the larger commercial networks – while major operators like Telemex can ignore smaller communities that offer little if any return, local groups can setup their own not for profit services which give villages connectivity.
A similar thing is developing with solar power, with PV cells becoming affordable communities which had little chance of being connected to their country’s national grid are now able electricity.
That poor or remote areas can now be connected to power and communications without massive subsidies or infrastructure investment is a radical change from the Twentieth Century model of economic development, these advantages change the game on many levels.