The Institute - March 2020 - TI-8

Builders put together a tower
in Sañuta, which is near the
shores of Lake Titicaca.

TI-8 | MAR 2020 | THE INSTITUTE

Science and its Global Adaptation Initiative
in Indiana. The center conducts research
to help governments and communities
improve society and the environment.
While at Notre Dame, he also taught for
the Department of Computer Science
and Engineering.

PRESSING NEEDS

CamachoNet was modeled after a similar project Murillo volunteered for from
2011 to 2014, part of IEEE's Humanitarian Technology Challenge, which ended
in 2013 but which gave birth to other
IEEE initiatives that are addressing reliable electricity and other challenges
such as the IEEE Smart Village.
The Peruvian Amazon Project, which
began in 2011, used inexpensive Wi-Fi
technology to connect health centers in
remote parts of Peru's rainforest-which
were approximately 40 kilometers from
each other. The infrastructure consisted
of 60-meter towers that housed radios,
antennas, solar panels, and batteries,

PHASED APPROACH

That same year, the first phase of CamachoNet began in the Bolivian Andes.
Two health centers, one health post,
and one health administrative office
were connected to the network. Work
came to a halt after that phase was completed, because of administrative challenges in routing IEEE's funding from
the United States to Bolivia. But this year
the project started up again.
Since 2013, the Bolivian government
has built hundreds of telecenters, which
have computers with Internet access, satellite television, and a telephone line. The
telecenters also are supposed to provide
online education to children, but many
facilities aren't operational because the

MARTIN MURILLO (2)

example of how local resources and knowhow can provide grassroots solutions for
pressing problems that mainstream development has struggled to provide due to
their disconnection with the local reality
and resources and their lack of technical expertise."
Murillo is an electrical engineer and
political scientist who grew up in Bolivia
and earned his bachelor's, master's, and
doctoral degrees from U.S. universities.
He has worked as a project manager for
several companies around the world,
including electronics manufacturer
Norbit of Trondheim, Norway, where
he led the implementation of protocols
for the sharing of cryptographic keys
for road-to-vehicle communications.
He also was a research fellow with the
International Development Research
Centre, in Ottawa, where he studied the
impact of technology on governance.
Prior to joining the CamachoNet project, he was a member of the University of
Notre Dame's Center for Network and Data

providing 24/7 connectivity. The project, completed
in 2012, enabled medical technicians to conduct
examinations and provide
diagnoses by connecting
with doctors and specialists
from several villages away.
"Putting an Internet tower
in remote locations is three
times more expensive than
putting a tower in the city,
so there's no business case
for telecoms to provide highspeed communication in
areas with a low-density
poor population-exactly the
people who need it the most," Murillo
says. "IEEE took it on because villagers
would most likely have to wait decades
for service. Indeed, experts say that the
world will not reach full Internet connectivity until 2050."

https://gain.nd.edu/ https://www.norbit.com/ https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/environment/ieee-smart-village-and-its-partner-global-himalayan-expedition-bring-solargenerated-electricity-to-lingshed-monastery https://www.idrc.ca/en/about-idrc https://www.idrc.ca/en/about-idrc https://gain.nd.edu/ https://gain.nd.edu/

The Institute - March 2020

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