Gadgetory

i just spent i think the most depressing single day of my reporting career at a refugee camp in Calais France it's called the jungle that holds about 6,000 people from many different countries they've come here to get to the UK for the most part which is very close but also very far you have to cross the English Channel to get there and the way they do it is by trying to hop onto a moving truck and smuggle themselves into the country on the train that goes underneath the English Channel it's not an easy journey many people have died trying to get onto the trucks one of the interesting parts of the jungle is a volunteer organization called the refugee info bus it's a battered blue truck they drive into the camp every day it's got up on top big homegrown antenna they connect to the mobile network and then they beam Wi-Fi signals to the refugees they use some network technology to throttle each individual connection each day they get about 400 people and they burn through sim cards pretty fast about 50 gigabytes of data every two days which is more than most people will use in an entire month all of the refugees I talked to the biggest thing for them in their digital lives was messaging apps viber Facebook whatsapp they share photos they talk by voice they talk by text they talk by video sometimes if there's enough bandwidth for them the refugee info bus is a digital lifeline it's a connection to the outside world that's really important people were surprisingly happy many people would wave hello so clearly the refugees despite all their difficulties they put a lot of importance on human interaction a digital connection really only helps so much there's no app that lets you figure out how to climb over to 15-foot fences top of razor wire and jump onto a moving truck there's no way that a phone is going to change the political climate in Europe to suddenly make refugees welcome in all these countries so the technology is helpful but it's really not solving the fundamental problems these refugees face