Series · 2 of 2 published
Our Version
The rich world builds something big: computers in space, giant data centres, networks that cost billions. Each post in this series asks one simple question. What is our version? It starts from what our communities already have, uses methods from work I have actually done, says the hard parts out loud, does the sums in the open, and ends with a small first step that could prove the idea wrong.
- 01We Don't Have Rockets. We Have Towers. A Case for Building Africa's Data CentresGoogle, SpaceX and others are putting computers in orbit because power and cooling on Earth have run out of room. Africa has no space programme, but it has tens of thousands of cell towers that already have power, batteries, cooling, a fence and a link to the network. This post asks whether those towers can be a data centre spread across the land, and answers with the same graph and scoring method I used to send generators to towers during load shedding.22 min read
- 02Where the Towers Are. A Map of What Africa Already HasPart one argued that Africa's cell towers could be a data centre spread across the land. This part asks the obvious next question: where are they? Using open, crowdsourced data on 565,000 mobile cells, it maps South Africa and the continent, finds that the towers follow the people and the roads, and shows why a map of people and a map of land tell two very different stories.8 min read
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