Kamaleon: Off-grid Internet on wheels

Solar-powered connectivity on wheels can help bridge infrastructure and information gaps in rural areas and restore vital communications when disaster strikes. ITU standard F.792 outlines how.

Kamaleon, a startup in Mozambique that designed the solution with rural communities and people with disabilities in mind, brought it to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) as the basis for a global standard.

Kamaleon’s founder, Dayn Amade, explains why the company became an ITU member and contributed its solution for standardization.

Who can benefit from this standard?

This standard embraces the last mile, particularly for areas lacking sufficient, if any, communications and electricity infrastructure. And it promotes smart villages, because most people in the least-developed countries live in villages. In the digital era, they are being left behind.

The mobility of the solution is very important. Our foundational requirement was that the system should be moveable with ordinary means of transport.

We are also thinking of internally displaced people and refugee camps, where the need for connectivity is often extremely urgent – essentially an emergency. We know this from experience in Mozambique, where natural disasters have destroyed key infrastructure and created need for connectivity to be restored very rapidly.

What are some of the services your design makes possible?

It’s not just a connectivity solution. It’s a multimedia solution able to deliver digital education and health services, many supported by artificial intelligence (AI), as well as e-government services.

It helps decentralize digital public infrastructure and the e-services communities depend on.

For example, people in rural areas don’t own smart watches to give them basic information about their health. They probably walk a long distance to get to the nearest healthcare centre, and those centres often lack the equipment or technology to carry out basic health screenings.

Our solution can provide health screenings and online consultations, which can drive major improvements in quality of life.

How do you foresee the standard being adopted?

The solution is already very much a reality. We have reached around 2 million people since our journey began in 2016. We have also supported a range of programmes run by governments and non-governmental organizations.

We started in Mozambique. The Gambia followed.

The aim of this ITU standard is to help more countries follow suit, and we are seeing considerable interest from other African countries.

We brought our know-how and experience to ITU meetings and, working together with other ITU members, we further improved and refined our solution as we developed F.792.

Why did you initiate the development of this standard?

Guidance approved at the international level by ITU makes things easier and saves time. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel everywhere similar solutions may be needed.

For our proposal to become an ITU standard, it underwent review and consideration by telecommunication and multimedia technology experts from all around the world.

An approved ITU standard creates trust.

Going through ITU’s rigorous development and approval process – being so well scrutinized – is the source of this trust.

Standard F.792 is under the responsibility of ITU-T Study Group 21 (Multimedia, content delivery and cable television).

The standard describes “accessible, moveable communication systems in rural and out-of-home environments.” It follows earlier ITU standards for emergency communications using temporary equipment in sizes ranging from briefcases to small trucks.

Image credits: Kamaleon