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DOI: 10.1145/1995376.1995402
Q&a
scaling Up
Eric Brewer talks about infrastructure, connectivity,
and computing for developing nations.

the UniVersitY Of California, Berkeley’s Eric Brewer has covered a lot of ground in his 20-year career. He was among the earliest to recognize the need for large-scale Web services, building scalable servers with clusters of commodity nodes and laying the foundation for contemporary cloud computing. He co-founded Inktomi, a search engine startup that peaked at $241 per share and $300 million in annual revenue in 2000 before collapsing as clients like Exodus filed for bankruptcy. (It was sold to Yahoo! in 2003.)

He has also been deeply involved with Information and Communication Technologies for Development, spearheading projects to bring telemedicine to Indian villages and develop long-distance Wi-Fi networks in rural areas. In May, he began yet another chapter with a two-year assignment at Google, where he is working on developing the company’s next-generation infrastructure.

 

for the past 10 years, you’ve been involved with a number of computing projects that benefit developing countries. tell us about your recent work in that domain.

One of the things we’re working on
is building a low-cost GSM base station
that’s appropriate for rural villages. Ru-
ral connectivity is expensive. Base sta-
tions take a lot of power, so you need
a big diesel generator. Then you need
to bring diesel to the generator, which
means you need a road—often, you’ve
got to build it—and you need trucks to
bring the diesel to the generator. On
top of that, if you’re building a road,
you probably want to be in a relatively
flat area, and you need a very tall tower
to get coverage.

does it leverage your previous work on
low-cost, long-distance Wi-fi?

Our previous work in solar solutions and long-distance Wi-Fi are both very relevant as they greatly reduce the cost of the power system and backhaul solution; we use long-distance Wi-Fi instead of microwave links to backhaul the traffic into an urban area that has relatively low-cost bandwidth.

Leah Hoffmann

What inspired you to tackle the project? in the past, i understand you were less convinced that cellular connectivity is the best solution for rural areas since Wi-fi is cheaper to implement.

The strong urban success of cellular means that many rural folks have phones, even if their village does not have coverage. Some use these phones when in coverage, others use them as FM radios, and still others have them mostly as a status symbol. Nonetheless, the demand for rural cellular is very clear, and the phones are often already there and waiting.

 

much of your work is done through technology and infrastructure for emerging regions, or tier, a research group you founded at the University of California, Berkeley. how did tier get started?

The biggest influences on the founding of TIER came out of Inktomi. First, I was traveling quite a bit, and I’d been invited to the World Economic Forum, where I had the privilege of meeting a wide variety of very sharp people from developing nations. Many of these folks were articulate about the problems in their country, and almost all the time my reaction was that technology had a role to play in solving them. And another factor was that Inktomi had done so well that I was, at least on paper, extremely wealthy, and starting to think more seriously about addressing some of these problems. Of course, I don’t have that money anymore, so I decided to focus on solutions via research by creating a community within computer science that could address these great challenges.

What’s your process for finding new
projects?

I tend to prefer infrastructure problems. I like to have at least half of my students working on core infrastructure, things like connectivity and power in particular. I [COntinUed On p. 111]