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Hi. I'm Mike Fitzgerald.
I'm CEO of Altobridge a wireless network provider that specializes in remote communities.
So we connect the remote communities in the world with a standard wireless
communication system that is cost effective.
When we look at these remote communities and rural enterprises of the world we ask
questions like, "Where are the power cables?
Where are the transmission lights?"
and the answer is obvious there is neither.
Now what we have to think about is, "What do we do?
How are we going to put out remote wireless systems in these regions
and connect them back?" So when we look at the biggest power territory.
We look at the operational overhead cost, the cost of running the system.
If the system is going to lose money then no universal service obligation from the
service provider can afford to put the system in because who is going to run it,
who is going to make money out of it, nobody.
So what we focused on was the three key areas power, how do we power it
efficiently; transmission, how do we connect it to the connected world
efficiency, and who installs it and who maintains it.
So when we looked at power, we said okay the diesel generator, getting diesel to
the remote community that is not an option, we must go solar and we worked
diligently in bringing down power consumption that was to a point where
today thankfully we can claim that we need enough power to run our system as you need
to run a light bulb, but interestingly we will manage to get good coverage out of
our system as well.
As we move on further into power challenges, we look at the solar power
itself and we look at the battery backup. We needed to make sure we can that down.
Batteries are expensive so what we found was different ways and different
techniques of reducing the number of batteries that you need.
When we look to transmission we looked at microwave, we looked at all the typical
examples that you have today and we felt the only way back from a lot of these
enterprises of communities was over satellite and there is a lot of deployed
satellite and there is a lot of satellite that is being deployed and it is very
economical, but it wasn't economical to connect bay stations.
We have spent 9 years cracking the area that is connecting bay stations over
satellite as cost effectively as is technically possible.
We then moved on to the urban insulation commissioning and we stumbled across
a great team. People that are existing today, in the
Nigeria's of the world or all over the developing world that are skilled in
installing these SAT sites, the little satellite dishes that you see around
and we have developed a solution that is easier to install than the SAT dish and as
a result of that we have already maintained deploying our systems wherever
we go and maintain our systems wherever we go.
The second challenge for connecting the world is on connecting communities
and enterprises is the area of capital expenditure.
We look at the tower, the traditional tower that everyone uses today and we
looking at sharing towers and we said, "The tower doesn't work when it comes to
these communities and it is not possible to cover lots of communities from one
single tower. So we looked at the idea of breaking up
this tower effectively breaking it into poles.
Why can't we have a light site that we can put on a pole and actually run a system
from a lower cost base, a lower capital cost base so thankfully we have achieved
this. So today and many places in Asia
and Africa, we have deployed our lights on a pole which creates a scenario for the
operator which is quite attractive where they can take their capital budget that
they have, take out a single site capital cost and actually deploy 5 solutions,
a ratio of 5 to 1 that is five more communities, five more enterprises that
are connected from the capital budget of one site and we have proven that actually
more subscribers can get a better service with this model.
Many of the world's great companies today have built in to their business
and corporate and social responsibility
and giving back to society not just being a great company and being a successful
company, but being able to give back. Altobridge has the unique position that
what we supply the whole concept of a remote communication system turning on
and connecting these remote people and that is CSR.
So to us we deliver something that gives us immediate feedback.
It gives us immediate motivation to continue to progress.
We have seen schools where teachers are able to communicate back to the capital cities.
We have seen farmers that were taking access to information where now they can
actually produce a better product and more products and we have seen the traders
trade those commodities to take that just agriculture produce and the general
enterprises that are there and get a better price in the market because now
they know exactly what price is going to be.
They know where their competition is and they are learning more.
To us the innovator is personal, it is a team of individuals that spot an
opportunity in the global market place and they spot the armory the tip that protects
that opportunity and they say okay we are going to bring this down, we are going to
actually succeed in taking this opportunity and going out of the global
market place and succeeding, but we need to have the vision, we need to have the
team, we need to have what we call innovation but you also need to have the
relentless passion to deliver because if you don't deliver then what was the point.