Flying cell towers are what the global fight to end poverty needs

[Music]

[Applause]

i got on a flight to johannesburg

to save the world three years ago

i was a sophomore at purdue university

when i had an idea i had developed a

brand new type of drone

one that could fly for 10 hours

continuously

without needing to land and recharge my

idea

was to give that drone to every

anti-poaching team

in africa a surveillance camera for

rhino

an elephant we would be able to catch

poachers

long before they got anywhere close to

the precious animals

and i talked to a lot of experts about

this folks you’d see on that geo

and they were generally positive about

the idea but the one thing i kept

hearing

was that you know rahul drones can’t

solve this problem

not entirely and i’m thinking yeah okay

but you haven’t seen

my drugs and then i landed

in south africa and reality sunk in

i learned that anti-poaching really has

two faces

on the surface is a veneer a veneer

designed to bring in

a lot of western money you see

tough armed to the teeth anti-poaching

guys who look

like they came out of call of duty

marching around the reserves making sure

that poachers can’t get anywhere near

the rhino but that is just a veneer

just designed to bring in money real

anti-poachers aren’t so much concerned

about

catching poachers as they are about

poverty

you see the people who do the poaching

the actual poachers themselves they tend

to be the poorest people from the

poorest parts of the world

when they commit the poaching they’ll

often write in their own blood

on the body of the animal please forgive

me

it was an act of desperation

and this raises the question how did

they get close to the rhino in the first

place

aren’t there supposed to be these armed

guards

it turns out the armed guards aren’t

really paid all that much

and they do love rhino and elephant but

they love feeding their kids more

and so bribing them is no difficult task

and then you ask yourself okay then why

doesn’t the reserve owner just

pay the anti-poaching people better it’s

because the reserve owner has learned

that the best way to get international

media attention

press and most importantly money

is to have a poaching incident happen

within your walls

drones can’t solve this problem and i

remember asking my friend and

anti-poaching expert

lb williams what do we do do we need to

give more aid

food water what’s the catch here

and he pointed out the window of his

jeep to a group of kids

wearing toms now tom’s shoes on the

surface is a brilliant concept the idea

is

you buy a pair of shoes here in the

united states and they’ll donate one to

a child in need

the problem is kids in africa

already have a place to buy shoes

african shoemakers make shoes

but african shoemakers can’t compete

with free

it’s an example of how well-intentioned

aid from the west

can have unintended consequences in the

field

all throughout africa aid flows in water

food

vaccines these are really important

people will die without them but then we

get to bicycles

backpacks shoes laptops

and suddenly in a lot of these countries

we aren’t just fixing problems we’re

creating them

by not allowing them to grow

the western world has gotten wise to

this they’ve started investing more in

something called

infrastructure aid it’s development aid

that actually helps people grow

and back in the united states i dropped

out of school i wanted to get in on this

infrastructure aid thing i had some cool

drones

and i wasn’t going to learn how to put

those two things together in

thermodynamics class

after i dropped out i started a small

company and took my drones to

conferences around the world

meeting the best and brightest to try to

figure this out

and all my roads led back to one place

the internet now a poor village with the

internet

is unrecognizable from its former past

a farmer in that village through the

internet

now has access to everything humanity

knows

about farming an entrepreneur in that

village

isn’t just selling her goods to other

villagers

she’s selling them to rich americans and

bringing in more

money into her economy than ever before

a young school child who couldn’t afford

textbooks

now has access to khan academy and

becomes

the smartest little girl that village

has ever seen

in short the internet has

become the greatest tool for economic

and

individual liberation the world has ever

seen

and 49 of the world does not have it

nearly half of the world does not have

access to their best key out of poverty

what in the world is going wrong well it

turns out like a lot of things in the

world

the problem stems from one important

thing

cash cell phone towers are not cheap

and you need a lot of them to cover an

area to have good enough coverage

in a city or town that makes a lot of

sense to build enough cell phone towers

to cover

a rich city it might even make sense

financially to build enough towers to

cover

a poor city but

building enough cell phone towers to

cover a poor suburb

or a poor village no

it doesn’t work no one is going to pay

to build 10 million cell phone towers in

an african village

and that’s when i had an idea what if

instead of 10 cell phone towers

we could get away with just three

the old model was building enough cell

phone towers so you could have coverage

everywhere all the time but let’s say

we’re working in a religious

town i know that on sunday morning those

folks are gonna go

to church so i can put up three cell

phone towers by the church and cover

everybody

then i know monday morning they’re gonna

go to work or school so we’ll put the

cell phone towers near the commerce

areas where the

uh schools and work is and then in the

evening they’re going to go home so we

can put the cell phone towers

near the homes there’s one small problem

cell phone towers are really big and

really heavy and like dug into the

ground

it’s really hard it’s impossible

to move a cell phone tower but not if

the cell phone tower can

fly now what i’m telling you is

patently ridiculous using a drone

as a cell phone tower i talked to a lot

of robotics experts about this and they

kindly informed me that the escs were

going to explode the motors were going

to overheat the propeller attachment

just wasn’t going to hold this isn’t

possible and so

we did it anyway i pulled together a

team of the smartest people i knew

into a garage in uptown minneapolis and

we got to work

and a month later after designing this

system from the ground up

we thought we had something that might

be able to do it and so

we took it to my parents backyard and

tied it down

we knew that if the motors could stay

spinning we didn’t even need to fly

if the motors could stay spinning we

would be able to stay in the air

and so we started we ran the motors

24 hours passed motors are still going

pretty good news one week

two weeks

three weeks

four weeks that’s a world record

five weeks and after six weeks

42 days minneapolis got hit by a

blizzard and we had to shut our test

down

but the point is we had a flying cell

phone tower it worked

and we were going to use it so what did

we do naturally we went to france

uh every year in cuberone they run

the french national windsurfing

championship and there are two big

problems

the first is the town of cuberon has a

couple of hundred people and barely

enough internet access to cover them

when you bring in a thousand or several

thousand people

for a windsurfing championship their

network just can’t handle it

and the second big problem for

windsurfing championships

is that windsurfing is really really

boring to watch

because you’re standing on the beach and

you have little dots out in the bay

and that’s that’s the wind surfers they

look like ants

so we’re going to try to solve both

these problems within a couple of hours

of arriving we were able to put up our

flying cell phone towers and cover the

entire area with 4g and 5g

network coverage and we had a friend of

ours

who was also a drone pilot bring his

drone along he put on a 16k

360 degree vr camera and

flew his drone through the windsurfing

championship

suddenly we could live stream

that video to people wearing virtual

reality goggles

on the beach you didn’t have to watch

little ants

out in the sea you could fly through the

competition

and this was of course a huge

development and a really cool new way

to experience sports but we were not

done

a month later we had the opportunity to

be involved with operation

convergent response a large-scale

demonstration

of america’s first responders and

networking abilities

post-disaster the situation we were

involved in was a large-scale flood

in perry georgia they actually flooded

several city blocks

and brought in hundreds of first

responders to respond to the crisis

and while they were out in the field our

systems were flying to provide internet

access

and we learned a lot of important things

while we were there

when a disaster strikes it takes a few

days to a few weeks for the cavalry to

roll in

the cellular on wheels systems the

permanent towers for days and weeks

first responders operate in the dark

without internet and in the first days

and weeks is when people are trapped in

buildings

and under floods today it’s a highly

manual process

to go in from building the building and

find them and

unfortunately you leave a lot of stones

unturned

but if you can get internet access the

day

after a disaster happens everybody

trapped

their cell phone connects to the

internet suddenly you know exactly where

everybody trapped is

and as a result a couple of months later

and

from this point a few weeks ago when

hurricane laura slammed into the

southern united states

one day later our systems were there

being tested

as internet for first responders

now the implications of our system for

temporary events

for disaster recovery are massive

but we started this this idea of using a

flying cell phone tower that you could

move

to help the global south to help where

this entire journey started in africa

and so a few weeks ago we got

confirmation that we were going to send

our first systems

to kenya as africa’s first

drone-based flying cell towers i was

telling some of my friends about this

including one who was a telecom operator

in south africa and he told me a story

he told me about the story of how he

tried to build a tower on a hill

in south africa in a village so he built

this tower at his own expense

and went back to his office and a few

days later his phone buzzed

the cell phone tower had been stolen

sold for scraps

and so he went back at his own personal

expense to build a new cell phone tower

and this time for good measure he put a

sign in both english and close-up

please don’t steal this he went back

home and

within a few days he got another

notification the cell phone

tower had been stolen he went back and

lo and behold the cell phone tower was

gone and the sign was gone too

he had had enough this time he built a

cell phone tower and put

600 volt spikes in the ground

threatening

anybody who would touch his precious

cell phone tower

with the penalty of death

he went home a few hours later he got a

phone call

from a less than pleased government

official who

informed him that his spikes idea was

not only

a safety violation but a violation of

human decency human rights and common

sense and that he needed to go and take

those spikes down before he hurt

somebody so he drove back to the hill

by the time he got there the tower and

the spikes

were already gone this

raises an important point if we deploy

it can’t be our cell phone tower it’s

got to be

theirs it’s the farmer who grows enough

crops

to feed his people the entrepreneur

who brings in unprecedented amounts of

money

into her local economy and it’s the

student

who becomes smarter than anyone that

village has ever seen

when we deploy after a disaster it’s the

first responders

who are actually saving lives enabled by

our technology

and fundamentally if we deploy it all

it’ll have been because of you you see

drones can’t solve this problem

unless people like you pay attention

people citizens of the richest and most

powerful country in the world

of which i am one too and despite that

it took me

a flight to south africa to learn that

some of the world’s biggest

problems were simply symptoms of poverty

it took me a flight to south africa

to learn that we already had a really

great solution

to help people get out of poverty the

internet and almost half the world

didn’t have access

and it took a flight to south africa to

meet the people who

inspired me enough to try to do

something about it

i hope you’ll consider this your flight

to south africa

[Applause]

you