Malaysian villages go Wi-Fi

The government of Malaysia is deploying Wi-Fi in up to 4000 villages in Perlis, Sabah and Sarawak by the end of 2012 to bring broadband to the more remote parts of the country. The cost of deploying Wi-Fi in each village is between US$7,000 and US$10,000. The Malaysian government wants to upgrade the high tech skills of Malaysians. They realize that to increase the level of prosperity in Malaysia, everyone – kids, teens, older people – need cheap access to broadband so that they can learn to use and develop online applications, and acquire diverse skills that are required to work in a more sophisticated economy.

The Malaysian government is headed in the right direction. In a recently published book called The Atlas of Economic Complexity, the researchers, led by Ricardo Hausmann, director of Harvard’s Center for International Development and former Minister of Planning for Venezuela, and Cesar A. Hidalgo, assistant professor at MIT’s Media Laboratory and faculty associate at Harvard’s Center for International Development, show how the total amount of knowledge embedded in a country’s economy can be measured by a factor they call “economic complexity.”

According to the book’s authors, the more diverse and specialized jobs a country’s citizens have, the greater the country’s ability to produce complex products that few other countries can produce, making the country more prosperous. “The total amount of knowledge embedded in a hunter-gatherer society is not very different from that which is embedded in each one of its members,” the researchers write in their book. “The secret of modern societies is not that each person holds much more productive knowledge than those in a more traditional society. The secret to modernity is that we collectively use large volumes of knowledge, while each one of us holds only a few bits of it. Society functions because its members form webs that allow them to specialize and share their knowledge with others.”

Exactly what Asian governments, including that of Malaysia, are trying to do.

Posted in: Новости Wi-Fi