>I was thinking the other day of a good use for old keitai. If the
>manufacturers would just
>put in a circuit for simplex operation, like a walkie talkie, on some
>public family radio band, then
>old keitai could be used a walkie talkies for kids or for people who are
>out of range of
>the cell network. I bet it wouldn't cost very much to add this capability;
>it makes
>me flinch to see so much technology just getting thrown into the trash when
>the next
>model comes out.
If the Japanese hadn't been so utterly and incredibly s-t-u-p-i-d to
develop their own homebreed cellular standard, but would instead have
chosen either GSM or D-AMPS *as-is* (not using any different frequency band
or reverse the uplink/downlink direction or other silly non-standard
gimmicks like Japanese CDMA does), then those phones could be recycled
(www.recellular.com) and help countries like -say- Bangladesh to improve
their infrastructure.
That would do a lot more good than paying so called economic aid in return
for a vote on pro-whaling from the receiver countries.
In Bangladesh, most villages are without *any* telephone. Grameen give out
so called micro-loans to villagers who want to get a mobile phone and run a
public phone service for the village. The mobile phone will become the
village's public phone, which they run as a side business, but it generally
takes 5 years before they can pay off the loan for the phone.
Such phone services are utmost important for the local economy. Farmers in
villages with a phone do not rely on rip-off middlemen anymore to sell
their harvest. Instead they can inquire by phone about the market prices in
the "nearest" town. Grameen have been very successful in this rural
development program, but the phones are still too expensive and therefore
progress comes at a slow pace for the Bangladeshis. Digital divide in
action.
If Japan had GSM, they could donate -say- a million phones to Grameen in
Bangladesh and boost the program to get every village at least one phone
within -say- three months. There is plenty of other countries in need in
Africa or even Latin America. If we donated a significant part of those
replaced phones at least the "throwing away" of phones would be justified.
The EU has recently started to donate replaced GSM phones to poor countries
in Africa.
It's the same old pre-Meiji story again ... "We are Japanese - world
standards don't apply to us - what's going on outside of Japan doesn't
concern us ..."
DoCoMo continue on that path even with 3G as they will be non 3GPP
compliant with their network. Sure, they said they will later upgrade to
3GPP to become standard, but I have to see it happening before I can
believe it.
regards
benjamin
[ Need archives? How to unsubscribe? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
Received on Tue Jul 31 06:00:54 2001