>> * Week 2: How much bandwidth is necessary to have a real impact on >> development... and why?
First of all, I admit to having no first-hand, real-life, in the field experience in non-US environments, but perhaps I can extrapolate from experiences with our local school district. Originally we networked it with 64kbps ISDN circuits for each school. That easily supported schools with 50-100 PCs. Of course, the PC's weren't in constant use and when they were used sometimes they weren't accessing the Internet. Dipak Basu wrote: > For our target locations we have "standardized" on VSAT links with 64 > kbps uplink/512 kbps downlink. This serves LANs of 10 PCs or less. For > smaller 2 to 3 person project sites we are using RBGANs with > 32kbps/128kbps. These are desired VSAT/RBGAN rates. Our usual > experience has been 50% to 75% of these numbers based on contention > ratios. This looks really good. I don't know the costs of the VSAT service, but 512k/64k seems like pretty good bandwidth -- maybe even more than enough bandwidth for a village to have great email, pretty good web access, and even a little bit of VoIP. The email & web access would benefit quite a bit by the use a $500-$1000 linux server acting as a local email server and web cache. The interesting question to me is: what is the minimum monthly service fee that a VSAT and ISP provider could charge? In the US and some other locations there is a certain amount of satellite-based residential Internet Access for about $100/month. Could a village economy, including any central government based services, afford this $100/month? -- Jim ------------ This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by the dot-ORG USAID Cooperative Agreement, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org provides more information. To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd For the GKD database, with past messages: http://www.GKDknowledge.org
