In the developed world old cellular telephones are being scrapped. A cellphone has become a fashion accessory and a phone which is too heavy, too bulky or simply of an older design is of no commercial value. These obsolete cellphones could find a new life if refurbished and re-engineered for the emerging economies.

David Wade, Senior Lecturer in Space Vehicle Design at Kingston University, has a group design project drawing upon this mobile phone technology. The idea of his team is that the mobile phone represents a sophisticated communication device and instead of throwing it away it could be rewired with a larger keypad, an amplifier and larger handset and a new antenna. Doing this and forming it into a telephone booth along with a power supply (either ground wired or solar), would produce a low cost booth which could be established to serve a community.

"To link the booths together would need a cellular based service. To set this up using ground based transmitters would be costly due to the limited coverage area of a single transmitter. Instead, the best solution developed by his team is to mount each transmitter on a tethered balloon flying at a few hundred metres. In so doing this would cover a much larger area and reduce the number needed. Once in place, the system could be available in either narrowcast mode to offer a communication link for medical personnel and one-to-one conversation, or in broadcast mode to deliver radio type services to a community, eg school children programmes, family planning education to mothers or farming information."

David's group project team is evaluating this in a little more detail over the coming months. However, in my view, the ideas from his Kingston team are best applied in narrowcast mode as a data only service. Full voice telecommunications can come later from commercial services when the money is available. Here's how it could work: