The ITU has just put out a new report showcasing some astounding numbers on general internet penetration, mobile broadband (wireless) use, and how the developing world compares to the rest.

[2014 ICT Facts and Figures ITU (1.7Mb PDF download)]

A couple of the interesting statements and figures

• Internet user penetration has reached 40% globally, 78% in developed countries and 32% in developing countries. 2014 growth rates in developed countries remain at a relatively low, at 3.3% compared with 8.7% in developing countries.
• In developed countries, mobile-broadband penetration will reach 84%, a level four times as high as in developing countries (21%).
• Mobile-broadband penetration in Africa reaches close to 20% in 2014, up from 2% in 2010

Global active mobile broadband subscriber growth

• Almost 7 billion mobile-cellular subscriptions worldwide – The developing countries are home to more than three quarters of all mobile-cellular subscriptions.
• Fixed-broadband growth is slowing down in developing countries.
• Almost 3 billion people (40%) are using the internet.

Percentage of individuals using the internet, by region, 2014

• In Africa, almost 20% of the population will be online by end 2014, up from 10% in 2010.
• 2013/14 growth rates in the developing world will be more than three times as high as those in the developed world (12.5% growth compared with 4%)

At one end of the BRCK you’ll find a flap with an antenna post hiding underneath it. This is connected to the wireless modem inside of the BRCK and allows you to extend the range of your Edge/3G/4G considerably.

Many times we find that the signal from a mobile tower is a bit weak. Sometimes this is due to distance, other times its due to having too much interference in the way – such as buildings or walls. Either way if there’s a signal out there, you’d like to reach out and touch it.

Omnidirectional vs Unidirectional Antennas

Omnidirectional vs Unidirectional antennas

An unidirectional antenna is useful for fixed installations, where you know where the nearest (or best) tower is. The omnidirectional antenna is better suited for times where you don’t know where the tower is, or you are moving around a lot. There’s a good video on YouTube describing the difference as well.

Omnidirectional
We’ll sometimes plug a omnidirectional antenna into the BRCK. This is when we know the tower isn’t that far away and we’re getting some bars. It boosts it a good bit. You can imagine putting small antenna up on the top of the window, up a tree, running it out the building, etc. It’s easy and fast to do, and you don’t have to do a bunch of measuring or compass-pointing to make it work.

An omnidirectional antenna plugged into the BRCK

Unidirectional
A unidirectional antenna can give you considerably more distance, or range, on your mobile signal. You have to know exactly where the mobile tower is that you’re pointing at, but if you do and can shoot the unidirectional antenna straight at it, then you can reach a lot further – sometimes many kilometers.

Reg using our unidirectional antenna

Amping it
The final piece of the “extending your wireless” range puzzle is an antenna amplifier. This works with both types of antennas, as it sits between the BRCK and the antenna. These great devices help your BRCK pull a signal from even farther away. We’ve been using them in Kenya for the past 6-months, and they were extremely helpful when in difficult areas, like in northern Kenya where the signals were weak and far away.

Reg + Unidirectional antenna + amplifier (the little blue rectangle)

We also are pleased to announce that we have formed a partnership with Wilson Electronics. We’ve tested out their unidirectional and omnidirectional antennas, as well as their wireless antenna amps extensively in Kenya and have found them to be durable (and we did beat them up a lot), and highly functional. When we open the BRCK store online in the next couple weeks, you’ll be able to purchase them at discounted rates.

(Note: Reg does like climbing things)

A unique feature of the BRCK is that it can be modded and extended with other hardware through it’s GPIO port (on the bottom of the device). Simply put, this allows you to connect any type of sensor, machine or device to the BRCK. We’ve built this to be as open and usable as possible, so it’s built to be Arduino compatible and we’re publishing all of the information on it.

The BRCK GPIO expansion port

What you do with this is limited to your imagination and ability. Some ideas we’ve had include:

• Sensing (temperature, sound, motion, pressure, light, C02 etc.)
• Geo-logging/GPS
• Waterflow sensors
• Fingerprint scanner
• Weather or soil data
• Extra hard-drive space
• Extra ports
• Extra battery
• Satellite plug-in

I’m sure you’ll come up with more.

Keep in mind that because of the BRCK Cloud, you can also remotely monitor and manage these implementations and gather the data from them back to your own database for analysis, dashboard or other visualizations.

BRCK GPIO pinout diagram

Description

The BRCK 50-pin GPIO expansion is based on the Arduino compatible programmable ATmega32U4 8-bit AVR microprocessor. The microprocessor has a 16MHz crystal oscillator, 32KB of flash memory, 2.5KB of SRAM and 1KB of EEPROM.

The expansion pins include 19 general purpose input/output (PWM outputs, analog and digital pins), a USB port and hardware serial ports which support I2C UART and SPI communication modes. In addition, there is a power input port (4-18V) and two 5V power outputs (one via USB) with maximum supply current of 500mA.

The desired hardware expansion can be connected to the relevant expansion pins and an Arduino sketch for the application can be uploaded directly through the BRCK cloud.

AVAILABLE FEATURES

• Arduino-compatible Programmable 8-bit AVR Expansion Controller
• 32 KB flash memory, 2.5KB SRAM, 1KB EEPROM
• Programming of flash, EEPROM, fuses and lock bits through JTAG interface
• Standardized 50-pin connector with open-hardware pin-out
• 19 General Purpose I/O pins (A/D pins, PWM outputs, etc.)
• Two 5V 500mA power outputs
• Real Time Clock
• 4-18V power input port
• 16MHz clock speed
• USB-host port
• I2C, UART and SPI communication modes supported

The GPIO port is a 50-position female Samtec connector, ERF8 which mates with a 50-position male Samtec connector ERM8. Figure 1 is a pin-out diagram of the female connector that terminates the BRCK GPIO Expansion.

Figure 1: GPIO pinout diagram

Table 1: GPIO-ATmega32U4 pin mapping

Figure 2: ATmega32U4 Microcontroller pinout diagram

For detailed information about the microprocessor, see the ATmega32U4 Datasheet

We also make BRCK GPIO Expansion Boards which are compatible with Arduino Shields. The boards have header pin and screw terminal connectors for all the I/O and power input/output pins in addition to a USB (power and data) connector.

Table 2: GPIO Absolute Maximum Ratings

Figure 3: BRCK Block Diagram

We’ll have a more extensive datasheet available in the coming weeks, where we’ll also start testing out some different modifications to the BRCK using our own GPIO expansion board (more on that soon).

There are 3 primary channels for you to connect to the internet via your BRCK device that come in the box (others, such as satellite, can be added by you later):

1. Ethernet – Plug in an internet connected ethernet cable
2. WiFi Bridge – Connect your BRCK over another WiFi network
3. Wireless (SIM card) – Insert a local data enabled SIM card or use the inbuilt BRCK Net SIM card

Not a lot of people think about WiFi Bridging, know what it is, or why it’s a valuable tool in your connection arsenal. After all, you might say, “if there’s already a WiFi network to get on, why do I need to connect to that via my BRCK?” That’s a good question, the answer is if that network is your office or home network you probably don’t need to use it.

Why you need it:

[Image via SecureDataRecovery.com]

1. Secure tunneling via an onboard VPN
Let’s say that you’re traveling and using hotel, airport or coffee shop WiFi. How secure is that network? This is where the little tool in your BRCK comes in very handy. You see, we encrypt all comms between your BRCK and the BRCK Cloud (how you manage your device) and we also provide an add-on VPN service for you to be even more secure. You can already connect your computer to a VPN, but with the BRCK doing it, you can have up to 20 devices using that VPN at the same time, instead of them each having to have their own VPN connection. It’s seamless and it’s simple.

2. Hiding your connection
In a similar situation as above, when you’re on a public WiFi network, it’s useful if you’re a bit harder to find. When you connect your phone or computer to a WiFi network, it generally becomes a node on the same network. When the BRCK connects, it creates a subnet, which means that others with devices on the same network can’t easily find and use it.

3. Efficiency on your own network
Since there are 3 ways you can directly connect to the internet via your BRCK, if you setup your BRCK in your home or office as your primary WiFi access point, it can prioritize how it connects to the internet. For instance, it can have ethernet, WiFi and a 3g SIM card going all at once, and if one network goes down, it will seamlessly switch to the next priority (as seen below).\

Choose what order you’d like your BRCK to connect to the internet. Turn a channel on or off.

How does it work?

It’s fairly simple. The same way you find a WiFi signal on your computer or phone, is done via the BRCK, on this screen:

How you connect your BRCK to the internet

To WiFi Bridge, just select “WiFi Bridge” and choose the network you want to connect to.

I had a meeting yesterday with some people who had just come to Nairobi from Lagos, Nigeria. They kept mentioning the problem with power outages and how this happened multiple times each day. We’re no strangers to power outages in Nairobi either, so I commiserated with them and then went on to discuss the differences in power outages between these two large African cities.

In Nairobi, when we lose power it’s usually for a few hours, but that can extend to a day or two. My own experience in Lagos was that we lost power many times during the day, but for shorter periods of time.

A power transformer blows up along Juja road in Nairobi

We live in a world of poor infrastructure, with massive growing demand, which means that the cities we live in won’t be able to keep up. This problem is sometimes exacerbated in Africa, in particular, when you move beyond the cities as the distribution is not condensed, making it more expensive to extend our traditional lines of power. (As an aside, thank goodness for micro- and village-level power programs that are starting to pop up, as they can meet this distributed problem with a distributed product).

The power just doesn’t go off and on either, it’s not black and white, there are shades of brown here. Sometimes there is one phase on (brownouts), which means that we’re getting a small trickle of power that some bulbs can give you a nice yellowish glow from, but nothing else will work. Other times we have power spikes, which fry our electronics.

Case in point:
Last year in August, all of the power in Kenya went off, the whole country. Apparently, you have to spool up energy from the different generators to the country at intervals, which slowly ramps up the power to what is needed. Some genius at KPLC (our power supplier) decided to grab the big switch and crank it on for the whole country at once, at which point we had 400v of electricity coursing through our lines for 3-5 minutes.

Zuku, the largest terrestrial, consumer ISP in Nairobi lost 3,000 routers that day.

It was on that day we realized we needed to make sure that the BRCK power could handle 400v.

This is why we design and engineer the BRCK in Kenya. We had been building the power system to be smart enough to handle almost everything thrown at us, including those brownouts and the continual on/off switching of the power line, but we hadn’t considered that crazy of a power spike for that duration.

Reliable internet is directly related to having reliable power

So, the problems of crazy fluctuations of power is one thing, but it isn’t the only issue you have to think about as you build for reliable internet connectivity in a device in Africa. For us, we also have to think of how you charge it and what you charge it from.

When we went up to Norther Kenya on our expedition for the eclipse over Lake Turkana, we had to charge the BRCK off of anything we could find. This included the car cigarette lighter, connection via alligator clips to the car battery directly and solar panels.

Powering the BRCK in Kenya’s northern desert

The BRCK power specification are the following:

• 4-18V power input
• 8,000 mAh LiPo Battery
• MicroUSB and GPIO expander power inputs
BCS 1.2 Compliant Charging input
• Reverse voltage and over voltage surge protection
• Solar input compatible with cell saturation protection

Whether you use the BRCK as your access point in an office, or the BRCK serves as your internet connectivity device for syncing tablets at schools, or you use it as a journalist traveling to out of the way parts of the world, or you use it to send back data from a water pump in a village, we’ve thought of your problem.

Your internet connectivity is not just a matter of finding a signal, it’s also about finding power.

Yesterday we spent the morning taking a few new pictures of the BRCK, since there had been some cosmetic changes to the design (we moved the light on the top, and put the power button on the side). One of the first places we stopped was a school in Kawangware, one of the lower income areas of Nairobi.

Over the past few months, more and more people who deal with schools and education have been reaching out to us. There is a growing demand for connected devices, for administrators, teachers and students.

We intend to see BRCK coupled with tablets and Raspberry Pi solutions in Africa’s classrooms.

Making Digital Education More Efficient

Nivi Mukherjee runs eLimu, a Kenyan organization that designs a tablet-based Android app which helps prepare primary school students to pass their standardized exam to get into secondary school. They’ve been doing fantastic work for the past 3 years, and their program is really getting off the ground.

One issue that Nivi has with the system is that each of the tablets in the school has to have its own SIM card to download the most recent content (daily/weekly). You can imagine how expensive this gets with 50 devices at a time.

This is where Nivi and I sat down to discuss where the BRCK can fit in. We’re trying to see if having a single BRCK in a school like this can help reduce costs. The BRCK can download the data/information (and upload too, if needed), each day at midnight. The next morning, instead of each child with a tablet updating to the local tower, instead they would just connect over WiFi to the BRCK and get the latest content sync.

That’s just one way we think it could be useful, not to mention what can be done by the administrators during the day to get more reliable email and internet connectivity using the device. In fact, as we were leaving the school we asked Peter the headmaster how his tablet education program was going. His response was, “The tablet program works very well, our problem is internet“.

Customize an Ed-Tech Solution

Recently another education-tech focused individual got in touch with us, this time from Uganda, by the name of Johnny Long. He’s trying to figure out a solution that takes hardware like Raspberry Pi, Chromebooks, Arduino and solar, and then mixes them with software from RACHEL, Khan Academy (via Ka-Lite) and GCFLearnFree for schools that have poor infrastructure. It’s a hard problem, made harder by internet connectivity issues.

Because of his incredible depth of knowledge on software development and firmware, we’re ensuring he too gets an early BRCK as well.

The power of the BRCK isn’t just in the redundancy and ruggedness of the device, it’s in the fact that you can customize it to your needs. What’s needed in semi-rural Uganda is not the same as what’s needed in urban Ghana, nor are the needs the same between public and private schools.

For this reason we created the BRCK Cloud with an API so that software developers can customize their own software for the BRCKs that they run. We also provide a GPIO port which allows people to customize with other hardware, like solar, additional ports, more hard drive space and especially items like Raspberry Pi. We know we can’t come up with all of the ways to use and customize the BRCK on our own, and it’s in this industry where we feel a lot of great new ideas will flourish.

Whether you’re doing something for one school or you’re running a massive program such as OneBillion in Malawi and beyond, the custom software and hardware connectivity needs can be met with a BRCK.

I’m looking forward to shipping the first BRCK devices out to people who run these programs in the next few weeks, as they represent something we cherish about deeply about the BRCK. You see, our vision is a world connected, where the last-mile of internet connectivity is as seamless for someone living in Africa as it is in Europe or the US. There’s no where more in need of this than schools.

My business partner for many years, Juliana Rotich, gave a great talk at TED last year in which she talked about the unequal distribution of information globally during the communications revolution that we’re currently all a part of. Africa has started to overcome the infrastructure barriers to be a part of this digital revolution with undersea cables, smarter mobile phones, and a wireless ecosystem that is sometimes better than it’s Western counterparts.

There are still challenges however, and Juliana points out the fact that it costs 6x more to call from Kenya to our neighbors in Uganda than it does to call from Kenya to the US or UK.

Today Juliana sent me a link to Thingful.net, made by Umbrellium out of the UK. It’s “a discoverability engine for The Public Internet of Things (IOT), providing a geographical index of where things are, who owns them, and how and why they are used.”

Thingful.net – mapping the internet of things

Here we see a very visual example of this “unequal distribution” as there are millions more devices and things sending data around the world from the US and EU than there is in Africa.

This doesn’t need to be this way, and we think that devices like BRCK will help people get more sensors, machines and other devices connected. It’s not just about connectivity, it’s also about power and sensors and devices made hardy enough for the environment in which they reside.

From Juliana:

When I saw http://thingful.net (link provided by Bruce Sterling) I could not help but remember that major human intellectual and technological leaps; from classical antiquity, renaissance, scientific revolution, industrial revolution, analytic revolution, digital revolution, and now what others term the next industrial revolution of the Internet of Things; these revolutions have not evenly distributed across continents and nations. It is still the case today.

A quick look at the distribution of the IOT on Thingful.net, and you can see why what we do with BRCK could one day help to fill in the dots of the IOT universe in Africa and other developing countries.

The role of the BRCK and other champions of connectivity in Africa is to change the status quo and extend connectivity to the edges. It is a hard problem to tackle but one that we must tackle, I believe that Africa can be part and parcel of this industrial revolution, in a unique way that helps to bring together data from sensors, instrument complex systems and at the end of the day… engineer for real world problems.

We’re looking for great people to join the new BRCK team and help us build an amazing technology company here in Nairobi, Kenya. Simply good won’t be enough, if you’re not an overachiever (and can prove it), then do not apply.

Apply for all positions by submitting your CV/Resume and a paragraph on “why you” to BRCK.com/jobs. If you have a portfolio or a body of past work we can see, that plays well in your favor.

Here are the positions we’re looking for:

Senior-level Electrical Engineer
We’re looking for someone who has worked on small electronics, think telcoms, modems, routers, etc. This is not a junior position, so you will be tested extensively on your knowledge. We’ve got some minimums on this one, including; 3 years designing commercial electronic products and 2 years’ experience using industry standard ECAD tools (Schematic capture, Simulation and Layout tools). You also need to have a proven understanding of both analog and digital design requirements and concerns. More information here.

Senior-Level RF Engineer
If you love messing with antenna design and tuning, modems, 3G signals, WiFi routers and think network connectivity is the coolest thing going, then let’s talk. This isn’t a junior position, we need someone with a couple years of real commercialized products and real-world RF design. Most of the time we don’t care what your eduction level is, but this time we do. You need to have a BE, BSc or equivalent degree as a minimum requirement, with a masters or higher degree preferred.

Production Support and Procurement Specialist
The ideal candidate will be a self-starter, with a passion for enabling communication globally. We have very ambitious plans and we are looking for someone that can share our vision, and take the BRCK product to the next level. The position of Production Support and Procurement Specialist is a role that is crucial to BRCK’s continued investment in developing the most reliable devices, at an affordable price point. You will be working with the Engineers and developers at BRCK to deliver the BRCK product and its accessories to the market in a timely fashion.

Senior-level Software Engineer
We’ve got some of the best people in Kenya working on our BRCK Cloud, and we’re looking for a couple more people to join that side of the team. We’re looking for someone who is highly experienced and proficient in Ruby and MySQL, experience with Rails is a plus. If you know Linux internals (Networking on the Linux stack), then we want to talk to you too. At least 3 years experience of software development experience in team-based environments, and know what you’re doing around version control systems – preferably Git.

The BRCK is designed and developed here in Nairobi, Kenya. As you might expect, this is a very different experience than doing it in China, US or EU. While creating physical products is always hard. Doing it in Africa is harder. This is due to the difficulties around rapid prototyping, shipping costs and accessibility of components. However, it’s also the best way to understand the real problems and challenges that the BRCK is here to solve.

Reg Orton, BRCK CTO, is on this short video explaining some of what this means:

BRCK: Designed in Kenya from BRCK on Vimeo.

Some key thoughts on this from our end:

• We are not an off the shelf solution and rebranding
• We are pushing the limits of what is possible to do without
• Retail price point dictates smart design and challenging design
• We want our engineers close to the problem to really understand the requirements. This makes things harder than if we were designing in China
• We are developing a far better product by doing custom design
• Our volumes are lower in this market segment than if we were designing an ordinary router device.
• We are developing a company here, not a fly by night product. We want our v2 and v3 products to be heads above everyone else.
• Doing this allows us to rethink a lot of the assumptions that existing products use.

(Note: I’ll do another post later on the challenges, constraints and opportunities of designing in Africa, but here’s a real case study for why it’s important.)

Reg and Philip spent a day last week at Amboseli working with a group of conservationist called Lion Guardians, who have a permanent camp about 10km from the edge of the Amboseli National Park. They went at their request to see if BRCK could solve their current connectivity challenges before they invested in satellite equipment.

A Problem of Too Many GSM Towers

The situation is that Lion Guardians can get decent signal from one operator (Airtel) but very slow data connections. They can also receive signal from another mobile operator (Safaricom) in certain physical locations within the camp but it requires standing in one spot and holding their phone in a certain way. One of the workers is able to send/receive data by holding his laptop in one of these spots to get a decent data connection.

Reg and Philip spent a couple of hours surveying the signals with a combination of the OpenSignal Android phone app and the Wilson boost equipment. They found a very strong Airtel signal but it only provided edge data. They found more than one Safaricom signals, one of them provided no data – even with strong signal – and another provided reasonable edge performance. However, when locating in the exact spot identified, they were able to get 3G signal and faster data.

After attempting to secure a reliable signal from the identified 3G tower (they were tracking tower IDs) they stumbled upon a hypothesis for this type of situation, which isn’t an uncommon issue.

The hypothesis is that the 3G tower is the tower that is furthest from camp and therefore has the weakest signal. From most locations in camp, one of the stronger signals from the other towers is given preference and no/poor data connections are the result. However, when standing in a location that blocks the stronger towers (due to a building and a tree), the weaker signal take precedent and a solid 3G connection is possible. As we understand it, the device will usually “hear” several towers and then has to make a decision about which one it’s actually going to talk to. Signal strength, not quality, tends to be the easiest metric to engineer for.

A BRCK GSM Lock-on Solution

The opportunity is to create a means of forcing the selection of a specific tower ID even if other towers have stronger signals. In order to achieve this improved result we are going to need to address two principal issues:

• The first is that we have to develop a means of indicating to the BRCK which tower IDs are acceptable and which should be rejected.
• The second is to develop a means of doing effective site surveys that will allow anyone to identify the best carrier/tower combination for a given location.

If we can do this then we should be able to offer a very competitive performance improvement in locations with mixed/limited coverage. You can imagine being out with your BRCK in a new environment and getting a list of possible connections, and choosing the best one – not the strongest one, in the future.

This observation further reinforces our “engineered in Africa” position since we would likely not encounter this scenario in the West. The fact that Safaricom has multiple towers but only some of them have good data connections is a very unique problem for the emerging markets.

With respect to Lion Guardians, they have been told that a new Safaricom tower is coming that will be close to camp. This will likely provide them with the performance they are looking for. However, they will still need a BRCK since they want to have a single, reliable, self-powered connection that is shared using an outdoor Ubiquity WiFi AP.