Intel went wireless in Parintins in September 2006. A 300-foot tower rises like a scepter over the city, holding aloft the antenna for a microwave link that connects Intel's local sites with a satellite dish that, in turn, connects to the Internet. The link runs on WiMAX, a wireless technology that carries information more rapidly than Wi-Fi and for longer distances. Through World Ahead, Intel has been promoting WiMAX in rural areas and emerging countries where telephone wires, television cable, optical fibers, and even cellular networks have been uneconomic. The company's strategy is to create a WiMAX market that it can dominate. (Laptops with Intel WiMAX will hit stores this year.)
"The demonstration projects are a rip-off of the Nike slogan, 'Just do it,'" says Barrett. "I've given presentations around the world about the latest broadband wireless technologies. People will say, 'That's very interesting,' and go away. But if you do a demonstration like Parintins in their backyard, people take notice. And they start to say, 'This is not theory. Look, it's real. You can touch it.'"
Parintins was selected by Intel in the summer of 2006, shortly before Barrett was due to visit Brazil, Intel's largest customer in Latin America. The company had five WiMAX pilot projects in urban areas such as Brasília, but the government was encouraging rural development. So Jim Whittaker, then Intel's director of government and education affairs in Latin America, asked the World Ahead team to add a program in the Amazon.
José Bruzadin, manager of health-care projects for Intel Brazil, proposed that Parintins be the company's first telemedicine venture in the country. Parintins was big enough to benefit from online communications, remote enough to present a logistical challenge, and famous enough to be a showcase for a nation with vast potential for wireless demand--the town's annual Boi Bumbá, or festival of the ox, attracts tens of thousands of visitors. In the telemedicine project, specialized cameras would provide doctors and patients in the island city with access to specialists in São Paulo, especially cardiologists and dermatologists, a priority in an area where skin cancer is prevalent. Parintins mayor Frank Bi Garcia agreed to supply electricity, air-conditioning, and furniture for the project. "In Parintins, it looked like we could work well with the locals and would get good support," says Elaine Nucci, market-development manager for Intel Brazil. "You can't put technology out there if people aren't prepared to take advantage of it.
The World Ahead crew also set up computer labs in two of the city's poorest schools, providing 84 PCs, and lined up other donors.
The market for computers in Brazilian schools could reach 50 million machines, and Intel isn't about to concede it, even to such a noble endeavor as the One Laptop Per Child Foundation. While OLPC was still developing its design, Intel--perhaps channeling its famously aggressive former CEO, Andy Grove--quickly developed competitive machines and began selling them in partnership with local companies, an important consideration for many government purchases. After Intel dismissed OLPC's computer as a "gadget," OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte accused the company of trying to destroy a humanitarian mission because its computer used microprocessors from rival Advanced Micro Devices. Intel has since joined the OLPC board--in April, the company will announce a microprocessor for a new iteration of the OLPC computer--but it continues to compete. Intel's low-cost Classmate PC is being made in Brazil by Positivo Informática, which supplies PCs and related products and services to 8,900 schools in the country; the PCs Intel bought for Parintins came from Positivo. (OLPC laptops are made in Taiwan.)
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Recent Comments | 7 Total
February 18, 2008 at 4:41pm by Ron Boto
On the one hand Intel is doing something constructive and you have to applaud them for that. On the other hand what they are doing should only be normal for a company.