Re: [DisasterRadio] Comms as a $ervice?

Hi all I've been thinking a bit about Disaster radio in contexts where there isn't much in the way of existing infrastructure. In particular, I've been looking at the pay-as-you-go solar model, and how that's been effective in an African context at getting hundreds of thousands of people connected to solar energy: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2018/01/29/when-mobile-meets-modular-pay… I'm wondering if this approach could be applied to comms? If you/ we were to fund an initial deployment of say a hundred nodes into a medium-sized African city. One or two Disaster radio nodes in that city network are connected to the Mobile phone network. If $X per day has been received in mobile micro-payments, then it removes the network-wide obnoxious banner-ad soliciting mobile payment? Or maybe it removes the annoying two minutes forced a timeout on the wifi networks? It seems a bit counter-intuitive to look at ways to annoy users, and just to be clear I'm not looking to 'monetize' this in a way that extracts value. But if city-wide networks could self-fund further rollout, then you could be looking at something that could scale in really interesting, potentially transformative ways. After the capital costs of the network had been paid, and enough income raised to roll out to the next city, the ads/ timeout/ annoyance could be permanently removed, and the residents would collectively own their own infrastructure. Thanks Sam _______________________________________________ DisasterRadio mailing list DisasterRadio(a)lists.sudoroom.org https://sudoroom.org/lists/listinfo/disasterradio