The digital pony express.

Via: daily wireless

A digital pony express is operating in Cambodia.

The system, developed by First Mile Solutions, uses a receiver box powered by the motorcycle’s battery. Five Motomen ride their routes five days a week, downloading and uploading e-mail. The driver need only roll slowly past the school to download all the village’s outgoing e-mail and deliver incoming e-mail. Using 5 Honda motorcycles equipped with FMS Mobile Access Points, it links to 15 solar-powered village schools, telemedicine clinics, and governor’s office in a remote province of Cambodia.

Newly collected information is stored for the day in a computer strapped to the back of the motorcycle. At dusk, the motorcycles converge on the provincial capital, Ban Lung, where a school is equipped with a satellite dish, allowing a bulk e-mail exchange with the outside world.

The Motoman program is sponsored by American Assistance for Cambodia and the Media Laboratory of MIT. The Media Lab gives technical advice to the Motoman program, which offers Third World schools a way to cut costs by sharing one dish and one uplink fee.
The entire network was implemented within one month by a team of three people at a cost of approximately $500 per village.

Users say the Motoman system is starting to change lives.
“It helps us with our diagnoses,” Chanmarith Ly, deputy director of the provincial hospital in Ban Lung, said of the telemedicine project that allows him to send photographs of patients, X-rays, ultrasound images and electrocardiograms to specialists in Boston at Partners Telemedicine, a program of the Partners HealthCare System.

Doctors from the staff of Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Medical School review the files and send diagnoses, all pro bono. The project was implemented for CambodiaSchools.com, which operates 225 rural schools throughout Cambodia with funding from private donors and the World Bank."