The Lincos model, complete with the shipping containers, is also being rolled out by Pride Africa, a Nairobi, Kenya, organization that has established 58 primitive bank branches in five African countries for 100,000 of the region's poorest people. Lucy Wamboi Kirita was one of the first to use a Pride Africa banking center, called SunLink, when she took out a loan to stock her small grocery shack. Soon, with the help of a satellite hookup, Kirita can go to the SunLink branch to tap into the Internet and discover the price of goods in neighboring communities. She'll also be able to work online with other grocers to purchase goods at volume prices. In India, milk cooperatives use E-mail to do business.
Dairy farmers go online at the co-ops to check prices in neighboring towns, then auction their milk.
Others, such as Sushila Jaganath Kuth of Baherwadi Village, Maharashtra, in India, will go to a nearby cooperative to weigh milk, and then send the weight via E-mail to a larger cooperative. That's just what they do. Of course, giving people in developing nations ubiquitous Internet access requires infrastructure. In India, just 25 million people out of a population of 1 billion have telephones, and only 2 million have Internet connections. Analog Devices Inc. Midas Communication Technologies PVT Ltd. and Analog Devices have developed a low-cost fixed wireless network that can be deployed to villages within 35 kilometers of a phone line.