Rhizomatica

Self-portrait

According to the ITU, 2-3 billion people around the world lack affordable mobile telephone services that facilitate critical communications and access to information. Due to market saturation in developed countries and economic disincentive in the developing world and especially rural areas, mobile coverage proliferation is slowing dramatically worldwide. And yet most telecom regulations forbid the provision of strictly rural service, effectively killing any chance for micro-telco’s to thrive.

Currently, only very large, powerful companies have access to the mobile spectrum and the concessions to provide cellular service. But their business model and the technology that these traditional providers use have proven unable to solve the problem of connecting much of the world. We want to break this oligopoly and allow communities to become service providers as well.

Thanks to a variety of open-source efforts developed in the last few years, it has become technologically and economically feasible for a community or an individual to provide carrier-grade cellular service to thousands of people. Yet no one has so far applied these technologies in the real-world, much less created the needed regulatory reforms.

We work as a bridge between the potential users of the technology and the engineers and developers of these efforts to ensure the technology is deployed and appropriate for use in the developing world.

Our mission is to increase access to mobile telecommunications to the over 2 billion people without affordable coverage and the 700 million with none at all.

Through efforts in Mexico and Nigeria, we use new information and communication technologies, especially mobile telephony, to facilitate development and community organization in the developing world. Our approach combines regulatory reform, decentralization, community involvement, and the application of new technologies to connect people and communities to services proven to increase access to information, development and, ultimately, quality of life.

Rhizome as Concept

(quoted from A Thousand Plateaus):

1 and 2: Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.

3. Principle of multiplicity: only when the multiple is effectively treated as a substantive, "multiplicity" that it ceases to have any relation to the One.

4. Principle of asignifying rupture: a rhizome may be broken, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines.

5 and 6: Principle of cartography and decalcomania: a rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model; it is a "map and not a tracing".

(https://rhizomatica.org/about-2/)

Description

Rhizomatica is a mobile phone network intended for rural communities that makes possible the creation of needed infrastructures by the community organization, and facilitate access to technology in remote areas ignored by the big telephone companies.

The pilot project began in Talea de Castro in the Sierra Juarez (Oaxaca, Mexico) conducted by Peter Bloom, a community activist that has worked in Nigeria and in the community radio of Oaxaca, as a solution to the lack of telephone service in the area. The project has been developed with the aid of community organizations, and the collaboration and assistance of engineers and experts in cellular technology. The network is connected to the local radio, XHTFM radio Nanhdiá, led by Guadalupe Blanco Méndez, thereby generating a circuit of communication between users and audience. Rhizomatica is also part of the organization Redes por la diversidad, equidad y sustentabilidad A.C. [Networks for diversity, equity and sustainability], and Congress of Indigenous Communication.

Its structure is based on the rhizome concept and structuring principles. A rhizome is a decentralized network whose nodes have all the same importance, being able to self-reproduce from any of its nodes. In addition, in case of malfunctions, the network can regenerate itself in any of them.

Unlike big telephone companies seeking profit, the budget for the construction of this network is only of approximately 6,000 dollars. Each family or user can access the calling services and send unlimited messages for just $30 pesos, i.e. a 700% less than what they'll pay for a commercial service. Moreover, the network is communitarian and the money is wholly spent on its maintenance.

Even assuming the high costs, the Zapotec people of areas of Oaxaca had been requesting the mobile phone network for more than 10 years, during which they were ignored because the ISP considered that it was not cost-effective to install the infrastructure for indigenous families in remote areas of low purchasing power.

The Rhizomatica project considers that the social tools for communication provided by internet are a right that cannot be denied to any social group. However, there are few instances to help democratize, increase access and improve the security of networks, so that the partners of Rhizomatica seek to reach all communities wishing to organize themselves in order to have a mobile network alternative.

Links

URL: http://rhizomatica.org

Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://rhizomatica.org