Vanu Bose, striving to bring cellphone service to ‘the last billion,’ dies at 52
The Boston Globe has reported that cellular base-station entrepreneur Vanu Bose, son of audio pioneer Amar G. Bose, died Saturday at age 52. Vanu Bose’s company, Vanu Inc., provides low-power base stations that can serve sparsely populated rural and other areas currently without cellular connectivity. Bryan Marquard at the Globe writes that the company sent free equipment to help restore cellphone service in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. Marquard quotes Bose as having said in October, “It’s been so motivating for our employees, because everyone watches the news and says, ‘I wish I could do something to help.’ Suddenly we have a way to help.”
An article by Jonathan Mingle in MIT Technology Review last month describes Bose’s efforts to bring cellular service to a million Rwandans—and the rest of “the last billion” who now lack connectivity. The GSM Association estimates that 1.1 billion people live in areas with little or no coverage. Mingle quotes Bose as having said, “Nobody’s been able to find a way to make rural developing-market coverage economically viable. The average revenue per site is just too low for [most service providers]. But it’s a potentially very big market.”
To address the market, Vanu Inc. offers Community Connect, a 20-lb. network in a box designed to withstand wind, sand, vandals, and high temperatures, Mingle reports. Rather than optimized for spectrum efficiency and data rates, the Community Connect is optimized for low power consumption and can be sited on a three-by-five-meter plot of land. Mingle puts the cost of a site at $25,000, including land, equipment, installation, and commissioning. Cellular service providers pay Vanu Inc. by the megabyte or minute.
Beyond personal communications, Bose had hoped to enable “pay-as-you-go” solar home lighting systems and provide access to weather, market, medical, and educational information, Mingle says. And as previously reported, access to mobile money can lift people out of poverty.
Both Vanu Bose and his father were MIT alums. Marquard in the Globe quotes MIT President L. Rafael Reif as saying Vanu Bose “…was deeply proud of his father, Amar, and of Amar’s impact as an engineer, entrepreneur, and executive. And he built an extraordinary legacy of his own that I know made Amar proud.”
