March 10, 2010
The Fab Fi Revolution
Scientists of MIT’s Bits and Atoms Lab are helping people in the city of Jalalabad, Afghanistan, to turn pieces of board, wire, a plastic tub and some cans into reflectors for a wireless network named Fab Fi. The team has put up 25 nodes in the city, with locals now having access to a stable internet connection. With a little training, they even figured out to how to expand the network by copying reflectors and making new links.
“You can’t always get nice plywood and wire mesh and acrylic and Shop Bot time when you want to make a link. Maybe it’s the middle of the night and the lab is closed. Maybe you spent all your money on a router and all you have left for a reflector is the junk in your back yard. That, dear world, is when you improvise.”
MIT is also shipping routers to Jalalabad to enable the city to further improve its network.
The Fab Fi project is very interesting, especially since it proves the relevance to rethink foreign aid in terms of injecting knowledge and expertise to accelerate local progress instead of an injection of externally-managed aid money.
“An 18-month World Bank funded infrastructure project to bring internet connectivity to Afghanistan began more than seven years ago and only made its first international link this June. That project, despite hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, is still far from being complete while FabLabbers are building useful infrastructure for pennies on the dollar out of their garbage.”