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In February of 2004, I had a chance to work with 50 students from developing nations all over the world, mostly from Africa and South America. Many of these students live in areas that barely have power, and may have one phone serving an area of a couple of hundred square miles. Many areas still use X.25 equipment to provide data links of 9600 baud or less.

The proper application of wireless technology can bring phone and internet service to billions of people who are not yet online. The training provided by the ICTP provides an excellent starting point for these students, teaching everything from radio propagation and antenna design to Linux administration. They produce an excellent handbook that is distributed to each student and is also made available for free download. Their training concluded with field work that required that they build a point-to-point link of several kilometers using antennas they built themselves. They were not only able to establish a 13km link, but were able to use it for realtime video conferencing.

The self-empowering, do-it-yourself approach to training at the ICTP is the epitome of the FreeNetworks message: teach people how to build their own infrastructure using commodity hardware, and they will have a low cost alternative to the multinational corporate approach to consumer-oriented communications. People want and need solid communications infrastructure, not markets and minute plans. Armed with good information and commodity hardware, they are certainly capable of providing it for themselves.

As a FreeNetworker, I look forward to working with the ICTP and helping to build public infrastructure wherever it is needed.

--Rob Flickenger, 2004