Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in money

Something we’ve needed for a while: a good hard stomp on the knuckles of all this MAGIC FACEBOOK DRONEZ FOR AFRICA nonsense. Provided. I especially like the point that in fact, mobile operators are building 3G coverage in these places right now using the exciting new technology of sticking the antenna on a pole. A case in point: Vodafone’s M-PESA mobile payments platform is moving this spring, into hosting in Kenya, having so far been based in a VF data centre in Germany. That’s a huge vote of confidence in Kenyan infrastructure.

I would only add that a typical national cellular network is between 3,000 and 13,000 Node Bs, and that’s a lot of flying robots, especially when you think that they will need to rotate home for downtime. It’s also a hell of a lot of aerial activity for countries that don’t have much in the way of air traffic control. And typical monthly blended ARPU in these areas is around $5. If you want to attach a flying robot to each cell, how’s that going to add up?

It’s basically the equivalent to all the people who were going to cover this or that with free WiFi back in about 2004 and we wouldn’t need boring carriers with all their boring regulation and boring unions and boring universal service and boring and why you so boring, Sven Radioplanner?

Speaking of which, I saw a Bell Labs presentation in about 2005 of research into mobile base stations that would actually be mobile themselves, chugging about airports on their wheels to optimise the network design. I note that I’ve yet to find a Node B chasing me into a tube station, like the infrastructure for the Direct Line phone. I suspect that the problem of designing such a highly dynamic radio network might be quite complicated. Presumably the drones talk to each other, so it’s a mesh network, and one thing we know about those is that they don’t scale particularly well.

It is actually true that the bellhead/nethead divide persists after all these years. At MWC the other week, I was amazed at the big deal people on the main site made about having an app or a Web site, while over at the developer event people would start up a RESTful service during their own presentations. Similarly, at IETF this week, I mentioned BCP38 to someone and they had no idea what it was – the stereotype of being a bit unworldly and not really interested in user or operator problems has a grain of truth.

But this sort of stupid cap-badge politics divide is just that – stupid, and misleading. It also acts as camouflage for all sorts of ugly prejudices and assumptions, in this case that Africans need saving by DRONEZ, that Facebook is the first of their concerns, that everyone who works for a telco or worse, a government, is an idiot, and that only idiots get involved with infrastructure.

Meanwhile in the UK, we still haven’t fixed the thing where you get to not pay rates on new fibre until it’s sold and profitable, but only if you’re BT, and Cory Doctorow is worrying about the renewed London property boom eating start-ups so they can be replaced by oligarch units.

Here’s a really nice group profile of Xavier Niel, Stéphane Richard, and Martin Bouygues from Le Monde. It’s a pity the reporter doesn’t sound able to assess anything technical they say critically – it’s certainly not true that Free doesn’t do engineering – but it does point up the way they seem to come from three different versions of France. Richard, the super-elite but entirely general purpose technocrat; Bouygues, the Neuilly heir to a fortune built on selling construction projects to the government; Niel, the guy from post-1983 who ran away to the Internet and thinks everyone should learn programming.