Wi-Fi-hopping brings phone signal to remote villages

摘要

Cellphones are changing lives for the better across the developing world, allowing farmers to use text and voice-based services to access crop and weather information, for example. But nearly half the population in rural Africa cannot access such services because of a lack of local infrastructure. To help fix this, a team led by Elizabeth Belding at the University of California, Santa Barbara, designed a cheap, local cellular network called Kwiizya - which means "to chat" in Tonga, the native language in Zambia's Southern Province. The idea is to give a strong signal to villages which have poor, or even non-existent, coverage.