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