Infoway cruise

Villages in one of the world’s poorest countries, long isolated by distance and deprivation, are getting their first Internet access, all connected over cellphones. And in the process, millions of people who have no land-line telephones, and often lack electricity and running water, in recent months have gained access to services considered basic in richer countries: weather reports, e-mail, even a doctor’s second opinion.

Cellphones have become a new bridge across the digital divide between the world’s rich and poor, as innovators use the explosive growth of cellphone networks to connect people to the Internet. Bangladesh now has about 16 million cellphone subscribers—and 2 million new users each month—compared with just 1 million land-line phones to serve a population of nearly 150 million people.

Since February, Internet centres have opened in well over 100 Bangladeshi villages. All of them are in places where there are no land lines and the connections will be made exclusively over cellphone networks. Before February, analysts said, only 370,000 Bangladeshis had access to the Net. But now millions of villagers have access to information and services that had been available only by walking or taking expensive bus rides, or were beyond their reach altogether.

People now download job applications and music, see school exam results, check news and crop prices, make inexpensive Internet phone calls or use Web cameras to see relatives. Students from villages with few books now have access to online dictionaries and encyclopedias. “We could not imagine where this technology has taken us in such a short time,’’ said Mufizur Rahman, 48, a grocery shop owner in Charkhai, a town of about 40,000 people whose streets are filled with colorful three-wheeled bicycle rickshaws, and where there are almost no cars.

The Internet centres are being set up by GrameenPhone, a cellphone provider partly owned by the Grameen Bank, which shared this year’s Nobel Peace Prize with its founder, Muhammad Yunus. The centres are building on a cellphone network created over the past decade by a Grameen Bank programme that helped provide more than 250,000 cellphones in villages. When that program started in 1997, only 1.5 percent of the population had access to a telephone; that has risen to more than 10 percent.

Ambia’s shop sits wedged between a stall where men sell huge sacks of rice and one selling cheap plastic shoes. y midmorning on a steamy September day, at least 20 people stood in line waiting to use one of Ambia’s two Chinese-made computers. A woman named Aleya, 55, handed Ambia a scrap of paper with a London phone number. She said that her 18-year-old daughter was getting married and that she was calling her uncle in England to ask him to help pay for it. Aleya said her husband is a construction worker who earns barely enough to feed their five children.

Ambia dialed the number on the keyboard. The call connected using VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) technology, which allows calls to be placed from one computer to another or a telephone anywhere in the world—for little or no cost. Aleya picked up the small telephone handset connected to the computer. Her uncle, who owns a restaurant in London, promised that he’d make arrangements to send money for the wedding. The five-minute call cost 8 Bangladeshi taka. “An 8-taka call has earned me thousands,’’ Aleya said with a broad smile.

—Washington Post / Kevin Sullivan