The human race is crossing a line. There is now one cellphone for every two humans on Earth.
From essentially zero, we’ve passed a watershed of more than 3.3 billion active cellphones on a planet of some 6.6 billion humans in about 26 years. This is the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history — faster even than the polio vaccine.
Sex worker group that is interested in using mobiles to survey their some 20,000 members
The Digital Dump: Exporting Re-Use and Abuse to Africa
The photo-documentary report entitled “ The Digital Dump: Exporting High-Tech Re-use and Abuse to Africa,” exposes the ugly underbelly of what is thought to be an escalating global trade in toxic, obsolete, discarded computers and other e-scrap collected in North America and Europe and sent to developing countries by waste brokers and so-called recyclers. In Lagos, while there is a legitimate robust market and ability to repair and refurbish old electronic equipment including computers, monitors, TVs and cell phones, the local experts complain that of the estimated 500 40-foot containers shipped to Lagos each month, as much as 75% of the imports are “junk” and are not economically repairable or marketable. Consequently, this e-waste, which is legally a hazardous waste is being discarded and routinely burned in what the environmentalists call yet “another “cyber-age nightmare now landing on the shores of developing countries.”
Siemens Networks, a joint venture of Nokia and Siemens, are installing new cellular base stations at a furious pace, the facilities almost always get their power from diesel-powered generators. However, fuel can account for as much as two-thirds of base-station operating costs. Add to that the expense of trucking diesel over poor roads to far-flung locations and protecting the valuable fuel against theft. “Getting oil or diesel to these stations is tremendously difficult,” says Mats Granryd, president of Ericsson India.
As a result, green energy is suddenly becoming more than a feel-good project for the world’s mobile service providers. As mobile networks expand far beyond the reach of power grids, they need to find alternatives to diesel. After experimenting for years with base stations powered by wind, solar energy or biofuel, equipment suppliers are preparing to roll out alternative energy technology in significant numbers.
Green Mobile Phone Base Stations: Taking Root, Beginning to Sprout
Market driven technologies are largely failing to meet the needs of NGOs in the Global South. There is enormous potential for mobile telephony software to help activities such as providing cheap and low cost information services, conference calling, sending ‘bulk’ SMS messages and collecting data for surveys. Yet the tools and technologies that are currently available to do this work are very challenging to use – making them out of the reach of most NGOs.
Environmental damage through a proliferation of laptops seems to me to be probably indisputable, but what’s the alternative? Is it fair for rich countries to consume vast amounts of resources but stop poor countries having access to the same services ‘for the good of the world’? Can we really in good conscience deny other people what we take for granted? Perhaps if we were sending out hundreds of millions of Macs or PCs there might be an argument here, but the XOs are massively less damaging to the world than any of those devices.
Mobile Telephony as a Disruptive Force
Becky Faith 