supaBRCK could be Africa’s solution to Poor Internet Connectivity
Since its launch in 2013, BRCK has been able to develop various devices that fit well with the African conditions of living, that means the cost of living, electricity problem, the reach of the minority to the media world.
BRCK an East African based startup has created a couple of devices that upgrade the African way of life in accordance to IOT and the internet: original BRCK v1, the Kio Kit for education, the SupaBRCK for enterprise connectivity, compute and storage, and the PicoBRCK for rugged IoT needs.
supaBRCK an upgrade of the BRCK v1 which was launched in 2013 to tackle the Power challenges and poor internet connectivity, seems to be hitting the Tech-news waves so early after it was released earlier this week.
Before getting deeper into supaBRCK let’s get to understand the previous version and its capabilities: apart from offering the Internet connections services only it could charge up to 20 devices via USB.
supaBRCK on the other hand for it to be an upgrade definitely the services and potentiality has to powerful: its runs on a dual core processor with a five terabyte hard drive ( 5 TB). That’s a massive space allocation, it supports up to 100 internet connections, let that part still not excite you: for the video heads, supaBRCK supports up to 50 devices on live stream capabilities and more super enough server capacity to fully run a Linux stack. You now can guess the reason why it’s called supaBRCK.
BRCK says its main aim is not only to offer services to the whole country or region but whole Africa, this meaning they are shifting from just being a hardware focused startup to a platform. BRCK together with Moja service aims to provide free public internet access and CDN services through supaBRCK.
With the biggest challenge still remaining that many African countries are not accessing the internet: meaning that the penetration to such areas is quite difficult to attain the global goal, Also coming up with a business model for the population which can’t afford to pay for the service is also a major challenge but BRCK is able to raise income through the sales of the hardware.
“Most of the big companies — Google, satellite companies — are all doing transmission, they are not doing distribution, That’s where BRCK has a real competitive advantage and it makes us good partners with those companies. They provide the transmission end and we provide the transition out — that last meter between your phone and the Wi-Fi,” said Hersman.
With the Giants also venturing into Africa to provide reliable internet for the nations, we need support from our own companies. BRCK has a funding back of $4.2 million from TED, Steve Case among the rest. supaBRCK sales are aimed to begin soon, going at a cost of $700, with expansions of MOJA network into Rwanda and Kenya this month.
