Ushahidi Made-for-Africa Modem Unveiled at TED

'If it works in Africa, it will work anywhere.'

Kenya Tech Firm, Ushahidi unveiled its new modem that is designed for Africa at the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh, Scotland.

BRCK, a small, lightweight box about the size of a real brick, supports up to 20 devices, with Wi-fi powerful enough to cover multiple rooms.

The modem works just like a mobile phone switching between Ethernet, Wi-fi Bridge, and 3/4G connection whenever the user’s preferred network is down.
After plugging a SIM card (the same card that measures the minutes of talk and megabytes of data for a phone) and with its 8-hour battery the modem provides a fully functioning network anytime and anywhere in reach of cell service.


The BRCK modems will be available in the market this November at retail price of about Ksh10,000.

About Ushahidi

Ushahidi, founded by Juliana Rotich, David Kobia, Ory Okolloh and Erik Hersman, is a non-profit technology company that builds open source software. The word “Ushahidi” means “testimony” in Swahili, and came out of the crowdsourced mapping platform they built during the Kenyan post-election violence in 2008.