Asia's rural poor connect with wireless broadband

"Factory workers living in a far-flung industrial estate in China are calling home using a type of wireless technology that could soon be shaking up communications worldwide.

The workers walk a short distance within the Dongguan estate in Guangdong province to a wooden shack housing a communications hub set up by mobile phone operator China Unicom.

There, they send emails and make cheap voice calls to loved ones in distant villages using wireless Internet technology supplied by a Canadian firm, Wi-Lan Inc.

Wi-Lan's equipment provides a wireless broadband network that spans a radius of more than five kilometres of a base station, linking the estate to the rest of China Unicom's network.

The technology has similarities with a new international standard called WiMax, a high-speed, long-range version of the popular Wi-Fi wireless Internet technology.

WiMax, due to go on sale in the United States next year, promises to transmit data wirelessly over distances of up to 50 km and at speeds at least equal to most wired broadband connections.

While the technology is expected to lead to new Internet and telephone services in rich nations, Wi-Lan sees huge opportunities for wireless broadband to meet the communications needs of some of Asia's poorest people.

'In remote regions in China, there may not be enough phone lines covering an area, so this works like a public phone concept but without the cables,' Wi-Lan's Asia Pacific sales director, Kia Chong, told Reuters in an interview...

Chong said Wi-Lan has installed 137 base stations linking up 324 remote sites for China Unicom in Guangdong under the first phase of the contract since May 2003.

Under a second phase, it will install another 120 base stations connecting 350 remote locations...

In India, another huge growth market, Wi-Lan has supplied US$500,000 worth of wireless broadband equipment to the Gujarat state government. That network provides voice, video and data links between key agencies such as the district court and community hospital within one township...."

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