[Brazil] Helping Amazon's wireless Net

from The San Francisco Gate

Intel Corp. Chairman Craig Barrett is set to fly more than 1,000 miles up the Amazon River today to unveil a futuristic wireless network designed to bring high-speed Internet to a remote city in Brazil.

Barrett's appearance in Parintins -- whose 114,000 residents live on an island accessible only by boat or plane -- caps six weeks of effort by 50 technicians from Intel and Silicon Valley allies Cisco Systems and Proxim Wireless.

Together with partners from several Brazilian organizations, the team installed a high-speed wireless computer network on the island. This is the first in what Intel says will be a series of similar projects designed to bring advanced technologies to the developing world.

"We wanted to get to a city that was so challenging that, if we could do it there, we could do it anywhere,'' said Ricardo Carreon, Intel's Latin America region director, in a phone call from Sao Paolo, Brazil.

In part the Parintins project is a field test for WiMax, an emerging technology for beaming network signals up to 30 miles. But the effort is also an exercise in enlightened corporate self-interest, as Intel and other tech firms focus on selling to the developing world.

"Look at the next billion-and-a-half people who we expect to connect to the Internet,'' Carreon said. "A good chunk of those people live in cities like Parintins."

This rain forest city is best known for its annual folklore festival, boi-bumba, that draws thousands of Brazilian and foreign visitors. When they're not greeting tourists coming upriver on cruise ships, residents of Parintins are likely to be sending cattle or crops downriver on barges.

Before the installation of the computer network, Parintins was electronically connected to the outside world through a satellite uplink that was sufficient to enable low-speed, dial-up Internet, according to Jose Bruzadin, an Intel business development executive in Brazil. As one of its first steps, Intel worked with in-country partners, including the Brazilian telecommunications company Embratel, to boost the uplink for high-speed Internet.

Intel and its allies then installed a 300-foot-tall WiMax tower. At four sites in Parintins -- two schools, a community center and a medical center -- receivers will translate the signal into the standard network protocol, Ethernet. Intel chose Wi-Fi, rather than a hard-wired network, to make the final high-speed link between the World Wide Web and the roughly 70 computers donated as part of the project, Bruzadin said.

Most of those computers went into the two schools where, said Bruzadin, "We can bring (students) access to a kind of information and knowledge they didn't dream they could have."

The community center computers are helping adults learn English and Spanish with an eye toward making the town more hospitable to tourists, he said.

The computers in the health center are tied to a videoconferencing setup to help the city's 32 doctors do long-distance consultation with specialists -- a potentially life-saving link, given that Parintins is more than hour by air and 12 hours by boat from the nearest city.

When Barrett cuts the ribbon on this project, he'll be acting in character. Intel has been among the most generous and consistent corporate backers of science and education. Barrett's visit to Parintins is only one stop on a Latin American tour that included a conference in Colombia to talk about ways to close the digital divide between the developed and the developing worlds. He was recently appointed to head the Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technologies, a United Nations-sponsored effort to help bridge that gap.

Bringing technology to remote locales is an effort grounded in corporate self-interest, according to Jim McGregor, semiconductor industry analyst for the market research firm In-Stat.

"The vast majority of growth (in technology) over the next 15 years is going to come from these emerging markets,'' he said.

A growing number of U.S. companies are examining how they can incorporate promotion of development and alleviation of poverty into their business practices.

For example, in December 2004, hundreds of corporate, government and nonprofit leaders, including top officials from Hewlett-Packard Co., Microsoft Corp., Chevron Corp. and Visa, gathered in San Francisco for a World Resource Institute conference titled "Eradicating Poverty through Profit." The conclave tackled the issues of how companies could improve living standards while doing business and whether huge numbers of very low income people constituted markets worth pursuing.

Nonprofit groups long involved in bringing technology to remote places welcome these new corporate allies.

Wayan Vota, director of IESC Geekcorps, said his 7-year-old group recently did a project similar to Intel's on a smaller scale and in the Sahara desert.

According to Vota, about a year ago Geekcorps installed an Internet-enabled computer in Bourem Inaly, a city built on an island in the Niger River not far from Timbuktu in landlocked Mali.

Geekcorps used an existing satellite technology called BGAN to patch Bourem Inaly into the global Web, then built a special low-power, dustproof Desert PC.

Vota described the Desert PC as a communal resource that could be used for such tasks as figuring out whether local farmers can fetch better prices by selling their crops downriver to Nigeria or upriver to Bamako, Mali's capital.

Inside the Desert PC is a microprocessor and motherboard designed by Via Technologies, a Taiwanese company that is a distant competitor to industry-leading Intel and its main rival, Advanced Micro Devices. What attracted Geekcorps to this motherboard was that it drew less electric power than a 30-watt lightbulb.

"This thing runs for 26 hours off a car battery," said Vota, adding that Via found the Bourem Inaly project so fascinating that it sent international marketing manager Timothy Brown to visit that desert town.

This new corporate interest in bringing computing to the edge of nowhere is a pleasant change to Vota, whose organization's $4 million budget is underwritten mainly by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

"Two years ago I couldn't get a person to call me back if I bled on their doorstep,'' he said.

E-mail Tom Abate at tabate@sfchronicle.com.