CLOUD COMPUTING IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES' COMMUNICATIONS INFRASTRUCTURE
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Anyone who has traveled to these environs has noted the whimsy with which cables are run, spliced and snaked above the busy streets. The apparently haphazard methods, however, have resulted in a surprising bit of new resource for internet-hungry populace.

Apparently, through a trick of quantum mechanics, the signals racing through the wiring are loosely coupled at these nodes that are pretty much at every intersection in Saigon and many other SE Asian cities.

Dr. Bam Boo Pak of the Malaysian Science and Culinary school explains “As happens in a cloud, where the water droplets are individual, but as a group can make a massive structure, the wiring and communications structure form a computing network. By tapping into these intersections we can share the information space, much as is done in Western countries.”

The collection of nodes act as concentration points, much as data centers in the US are nexus for communications and data infrastructure. A synchronization signal is sent through the nodes that cause the data transmission pulses to beat or “hum” together. By combining all of the resultant hum, programmers can take advantage of the combined computing energy of the entire urban infrastructure.

Dr Pak continues: “Each node is actually a storage place, much as a memory cell uses an individual transistor to store a “1” or a “0”. If you can manipulate the system to perform this fundamental computing task, then it is easy to imagine a gate array or microprocessor that covers whole city block, or the city itself.”

More work is being performed in other cities as the gigantic network grows. “We have our usual problems with lightning and other weather-related incidents.” says Dr. Pak, admitting that some of the nodes go down when flocks of birds congregate on stretches of the copper wiring.

Dr. Pak plans to publish his findings during an upcoming technical conference on Guam. “And just look, it looks like a web, maybe a cobweb, but a web nevertheless.”

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