PORT-AU-PRINCE (WiMAX Day). Coffee growers in Haiti are poised to benefit from WiMAX technology in the new year, thanks to a pilot project called “Traçabilité du Café” created by Alcatel-Lucent, Cafés Malongo, the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis in France and Haiti’s mobile telephone operator ComCEL-Haiti.

ComCEL holds a license for 3.5 GHz spectrum in Haiti that will be used for the WiMAX network. Cafés Malongo, the famous coffee producer and café owner based in France, is providing the financing and project management. Alcatel-Lucent has supplied the WiMAX base stations and associated terminals.

The project was launched last May to bring broadband Internet access to Haiti’s local coffee cooperatives in the isolated rural mountain areas of Cap Rouge at the southern part of Haiti. The project is due to launch in early January 2008 and the network will be open for use as early as February.

The WiMAX network also will assist in pioneering other innovative services in the field of agriculture that are critical to sustaining the economy in the Cap Rouge region, which includes over 1,800 coffee producers. Eventually, the project will allow for the possibility of telemedicine, eco-tourism for the town governments, and perhaps even telecommunications jobs.

“This action fits perfectly into Alcatel-Lucent’s commitment to narrow the digital divide in regions that receive little or no service,” said Thierry Albrand, Vice President of Alcatel-Lucent’s “Digital Bridge” initiative.

Plans are also underway to assist three schools in the region serving 1,000 of the area’s children, and a health centre in the region. “Using WiMAX we will be able to not only assist the coffee growers, but also their families and the communities surrounding the plantations,” Albrand told WiMAX Day.

This is not the first time that Alcatel-Lucent has introduced WiMAX technology to an underdeveloped country in an effort to boost its economy. Alcatel-Lucent has worked to bridge the digital divide in rural and underserved populations in Senegal, South Africa and Madagascar.

The project in Haiti is unique because it also employs RFID technology (Radio Frequency Identification). By embedding RFID tags into coffee sacks shipped around the world, the local coffee growers will be able to monitor the sale of their coffee, according to Alcatel-Lucent.

Eventually customers all over the world will be able to read the RFID tags via their cell phones to receive information about the coffee, from its small scale production houses to when it was delivered to the store shelves.

“The coffee grown in Haiti is some of the best in the world, and this technology will allow both growers and consumers to connect,” said Albrand. Like the local doctors that Alcatel-Lucent has connected to WiMAX at sites in Haiti and Madagascar, the coffee growers “need the digital bridge that WiMAX can provide.”