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We ♥ Bamboo. Exploring opportunities with Bamboo for rural internet
In this webinar, LocNet’s We ♥ Bamboo group has invited practitioners from around the world with field experience in using bamboo for construction to share their knowledge and explore opportunities to use bamboo towers for extending rural internet connectivity and connecting the unconnected.
The webinar will also be of interest to practitioners working in other areas of community development because it covers the broader role of bamboo in addressing community needs for local construction materials, along with the spin-off benefits and income generation for the community that can be generated by the usage of bamboo.
The webinar is divided into four parts and each part has a speaker dedicated to the specific topics:
- Planting and treatment of bamboo
- Use cases: 1001 ways to use bamboo to support local communities
- Let's talk about towers: Important design parameters for durable structures
- Construction and maintenance
What’s not to ♥ about Bamboo for Towers?
The high cost of network infrastructure is one of the primary causes for low penetration of connectivity in remote rural areas. Towers for signal relay, and often for picking up a connection at the local premises, are a key part of the infrastructure required to provide rural connectivity and are perhaps one of the most expensive elements of infrastructure in any rural network deployment.
To enable connectivity to unconnected areas, cost-effective solutions are needed that can minimise the cost of towers and rely as much as possible on local resources. Bamboo presents an important opportunity to address this problem, being a strong, fast-growing prominent feature of the rural landscape in large parts of the world. There are more than 70 genera of bamboo divided into about 10,000 species, which are found in diverse climates, from cold mountains to hot tropical regions.
The physical and environmental properties of bamboo – i.e. high durability, local availability, ease of fabrication and multi-purpose usage – make it an attractive material to meet a wide range of purposes.