The village of Sagara B is too remote with less than 5,000 population in central Tanzania. Copenhagen-based company Bluetown has erected an 80-foot Wi-Fi tower for the first time and connects the area with rest of the world.
The tower topped with shiny solar panels and a microwave link antenna that connects a fiber backhaul 15 miles away which thereafter creates a half-mile-wide hot spot offering download speeds of up to 10 Mbps.
People in the village have rented smartphones from the company and are being offered each GB of data for 50 cents.
Bluetown earlier handed over operations at several sites to Mobiwire Tanzania as it couldn’t scale its business in the country. Currently the company is focusing on India where it is offering services in more than 750 villages. In Ghana the company is partnering with Microsoft to offer internet service to about 800,000 people. Many places in the country are as remote as Sagar B.
Since 2014 the company is working on bringing about 1,000 villages in countries like India, Mozambique, Rwanda and Ghana online. It is curtailing costs of installation by using high-power hardware with a green energy setup that brings down the costs to one-tenth of a standard 3G base station. The system hence runs on free.
Presently Bluetown is not making much profit from selling data and so it is selling content distribution services via a local cloud to local organizations. It is providing videos and articles about education, government, healthcare and agriculture for free to users.
