A solar powered base station for cell phone networks
Courtesy of VNL
Over 80% of Africans live without access to the electricity grid. However, over 1/3 of the population owns a cell phone and that portion is rapidly growing. Developing nations are leapfrogging from no phone to cell phones - skipping the expensive and unnecessary infrastructure of land lines - and the use of mobile phone technology for everything from agriculture to banking services to health care is helping to improve the quality of life of people living in these areas. However, it still takes a cell phone base station to connect the mobile devices, and those take power. Luckily, there's one new model that takes minimal power, and it's coming to Africa.
Technology Review reports that a cell phone base station that uses as little as 50 watts of solar generated power has been developed by VNL, a telecom company based in Haryana, India. The base stations - which can range from requiring 50 to 150 watts of power - are easy to assemble, requiring only two people to assemble and mount on a rooftop in just six hours. That makes these ideal for use in rural villages, and the units will soon be sold in Africa, where sunshine is plentiful.
Free, Clean Energy Is Key to Rural Mobile Networks
This ability to use "free" energy is vital to getting the villages linked up, since the cost of and access to electricity is one of the main prohibitors to getting mobile networks installed. With these new solar powered base stations, an installed station can turn a profit even if customers are spending just $2 a month to access the service, as opposed to the average $6 per person required to make traditional systems cost effective. Not only is it cheaper, but it's also using a clean source of energy.
Mobile Phones Improve Lives Worldwide
The ways in which mobile phones and networks are benefiting people in places like rural Africa and India seem almost limitless. Mobile Active is a group working to help organizations understand how they can use mobile phones to get people involved in social change or improve their organization, reduce the costs of getting mobile phones into the hands of people who need them, speed up the adoption of mobile phones as a tool among non-profits, and facilitate the implementation of mobile phone projects and campaigns. With their help and that of similar groups, mobile devices are helping to keep the peace between elephants and farmers, save forests in places like the Amazon, get better health care to villiages, and on and on.
Solar Powered Cell Phone Base Stations Becoming More Common
With proper use and an inexpensively, reliably connected mobile network, cell phones can significantly boost the quality of life of people around the globe. These new base stations from VNL are a wonderful and welcome solution to networking people living far from electricity. They come in addition to the solar powered Ericsson stations that began installation across Africa last year, Huawei Technologies and their solar powered base stations going in to rural areas in conjunction with Bangladesh mobile operator Grameenphone, and likely many more to come. ABI Research predicts that over 335,000 base stations worldwide will be using powered by the sun by 2013, with 40,000 of those being completely autonomous and off-grid.
