Christoffel Kotze - A Broadband Apparatus for Underserviced Remote Communities: Connecting the Unconnected

We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before .

Klaus Schwab

Access to broadband Internet is the key to participation in the emerging Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), with those on the wrong side of the digital divide automatically excluded. This book investigates how broadband Internet can be provided to remote and isolated communities through the use of satellite and other enabling technologies, in the form of a self-contained broadband apparatus. It discusses how the proposed design can help bridge the digital divide by removing one of the main hurdles to adopting technologies: infrastructure. In turn, the book explores how the lack of infrastructure, especially with regard to connectivity and electricity, can be addressed by exploiting new technological advances in a number of fields, notably the newly proposed large broadband satellite constellations. In closing, it uses concrete examples to demonstrate the potential positive impacts of a broadband ecosystem on economics, governance and society, and on achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Unlike the three industrial revolutions that preceded it, which followed a linear evolutionary pace, the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is developing following an exponential path driven by simultaneous rapid breakthroughs in almost all fields of technology, creating a global transformative disruption across virtually every industry. A key characteristic of the 4IR is the creation of cyber-physical systems (Griffor 2017)the result of the integration of intelligent networks, systems and processes. The key enabler of the 4IR is broadband Internet connectivity.

Currently, almost 3.4 billion people across the globe are not connected to the Internet. Such connectivity is the primary measurement of a twenty-first-century scenario of inequalitythat of the digital haves and have-notscommonly referred to as the digital divide . This study aims to address these challenges by investigating potential technological solutions to provide access to broadband Internet services in a novel way to remote, isolated communities in the form of Broadband Apparatus for Underserviced Remote Communities (BARC).