Liver from ETel: Commercial WiMax and Meaningful Phone Applications in Vietnam
Source: www.voip-news.com
Kevin Nethercott, Founder, President and COO, Lignup takes the stage to talk about the Lao Cai WiMAX Trial Deployment.
Vietnam is an evolving country, Nethercott says, and the point of the project was to foster economic development by reaching out and bringing broadband connectivity as well as communications to these small areas of countries. US AID and Intel are the backbone of these and many projects, he says.
The hope, he says, was to connect this small town to the rest of the world. He says the majority of the people in this village did not have a phone, and had never even used a phone.
The small town eventually received a network that stretched a radius of 2.5 km, says Nethercott, as he shows images of residents of the town using phones for the first time in their small hut-like homes.
The process was broken into two phases. Phase one consisted of bringing Internet and VoIP services to this small rural town. This network allowed communications and trading between neighboring China to take place, hopefully fostering a beginning for extreme economic impact.
Phase two says Nethercott involved building a realtime application that allowed someone to connect to the commodity market to find what the current price of rice was. This feature, he says, allowed a farmer, who had no idea what his product was selling for on the market, to understand what his product was worth.
