From this base, a small group of determined geeks is using solar- and pedal-powered voice-over-internet-protocol phones and Wi-Fi to bring local, national and international dialing to remote areas of the world, beginning with a few villages in western Uganda where nothing resembling a telephone system has ever existed.

This says two things to me. First, you have a situation where underdeveloped areas of the world can literally leap frog the first world in a few short years. It's very conceivable that these kinds of deployments will become commonplace and will enable tremendous development to happen in these remote areas in a short period of time.

The second thing it says to me is that the $48B market cap of a company like Bellsouth is absolutely ridiculous. Bellsouth isn't worth even a tenth of that if you can put together this kind of infrastructure with off the shelf parts, relatively little cost, and some elbow grease. Sure, things like provisioning, billing, E911 service and network management are not cheap or easy things. But what's that worth? Maybe $500M. Considering that most of Bellsouth's customer base is in highly rural areas, areas that are usually subsidized from urban customers and taxes, it totally makes sense that you could disrupt this entire business model with relatively small capital outlay.

Yes, I'm thinking about doing that again.

VOIP Phones Give Villagers a Buzz