Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?
My name is Sandra Roberts, I work with a project designed to support ICT initiatives in the SADC (Southern African Development community) region. We are represented currently in 12 of the 13 countries in SADC and have nodal points in Tanzania, Zambia and South Africa. Recently we conducted research on telecentres in SADC. Here are my answers to the questions. KEY QUESTIONS: 1. Are high-bandwidth connections necessary, or even important, to making a real impact on development? Or are the costs and problems inherent in establishing such connectivity too high -- and unsustainable -- for underserved areas? Connectivity costs in Africa are too high, whether it is in urban or underserved rural areas. High bandwidth connections largely a dream in many areas. Also importantly there is not enough support for individual telecentres who are often in very isolated areas. 2. Are there cases that demonstrate the value of low-bandwidth (e.g., store-and-forward email, packet radio) solutions to provide critical information access to under-served communities? How successful have they been? 3. Can information distribution centers (e.g., public access telecenters) offer a viable economic solution to a community's information needs, by, in effect, sharing a single high-bandwidth connection among many users, and thus spreading the cost? Telecentres and community multimedia centres have not fared very well in Africa, this is due, in part to exorbitant connection costs, but also because they need dynamic leadership. Management and technological skills, yes, but leadership which is adaptive to the various conditions which a telecentre/ CMC will face during its lifespan. Unfortunately practical barriers include high staff turn over - people with the skills to run telecentres could get relatively high paying jobs elsewhere, and have more security than telecentres can offer. The practical reality is that many telecentres are donor dependent and have no plans to become self sustaining, or possibly have plans and haven't implemented them. So, yes, they can, but practically they often don't. 4. Are there new protocols that make more efficient use of the bandwidth that is available? For example, what role can the newer wireless technologies (e.g. Wi-Fi, MESH networks) play in bringing sufficient connectivity to underserved communities? Are the costs and maintenance demands of these technologies sustainable? New technologies require new skills sets and new support mechanisms. They should be adopted, but possibly not immediately as soon as the technologies are available. I think universities should be key in experimenting with new technologies and slowly developing plans for incorporation into their countries. Please look at our site, it will be launched on the 17 November 2003. www.cinsa.info Sandra Roberts Research and Information Coordinator CINSA Project SANGONeT Tel: 27 11 838 6943/4 Fax: 27 11 492 1058 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Website: www.cinsa.info; www.sangonet.org.za 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
Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?
Here is a bandwidth sharing option I have been thinking about. I plan to deploy this in Indonesia soon. The idea is to get a business, (perhaps a bank?) that has some bandwidth in a district setting, to share its bandwidth with a health center through a wireless access point placed somewhere near the health facility. If a local business is willing to share bandwidth with a health facility, the base costs of a router and wireless access point to enable that are around 125 Euros. Security software and routines exists to make sure that no one at the health center can hack the host. Then, in pleasant and practical public-private collaboration, the health entity that gets to connect wirelessly via the on-all-the-time connection at no extra charge to the host, can have free bandwidth to use for their ICT needs. This gives a local business an easy and low-cost way to act in a way that is socially responsible. There may also be a way for the health unit to recover some costs by charging some fees for offering VOIP (Voice over internet protocol) services such as the use of SKYPE or www.net2phone for contact. Think about how you might apply such a voluntary Robin Hood scheme. It's technically feasible. I have done it already on a small scale. In fact, this note come to you via a wireless setup... Mark Lediard 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
Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] Bringing Connectivity to Under-Served Communities
Hello Robert and others, On 11/05/03 09:14, Robert Miller wrote: With regard to Ahmed's note and the great work he is doing by bringing Internet literacy to the students in his university in Nigeria, what if you could connect one Campus Content server to that Internet connection and locally store many times the content in the US Library of Congress? What if this provided simultaneous access for several hundred users on campus? That is a great idea. When I connected a small college in Kenya to the internet via a 64K VSAT connection, I installed a cacheing transparent proxy server. The first time someone downloaded something, the content would be fetched from the server and stored in the proxy server. For all subsequent downloads, the content would be sent to the local requestor's browser from the cache and not from the server. This vastly improved performance and download speeds. Another advantage of using proxy servers is that the administrator can set up access lists and access times. So, for example, an administrator can configure the proxy such that when a class is in progress, the students would only be able to access the prescribed materials and nothing else. A week after I connected my college, I discovered that the network usage was inordinately high. Looking at the logs I saw too many connections going to Brazil! It was a worm that had infected the lab computers. The network usage was taking up precious bandwidth from legitimate packets. I wrote a two line rule in the proxy server to drop all requests going to the Brazilian site and the network utilization dropped dramatically. Thaths -- Slacker At Largehttp://openscroll.org/ Key fingerprint = 8A 84 2E 67 10 9A 64 03 24 38 B6 AB 1B 6E 8C E4 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
Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?
Mark Lediard [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Here is a bandwidth sharing option I have been thinking about. I plan to deploy this in Indonesia soon. The idea is to get a business, (perhaps a bank?) that has some bandwidth in a district setting, to share its bandwidth with a health center through a wireless access point placed somewhere near the health facility. If a local business is willing to share bandwidth with a health facility, the base costs of a router and wireless access point to enable that are around 125 Euros. Security software and routines exists to make sure that no one at the health center can hack the host. Then, in pleasant and practical public-private collaboration, the health entity that gets to connect wirelessly via the on-all-the-time connection at no extra charge to the host, can have free bandwidth to use for their ICT needs. This gives a local business an easy and low-cost way to act in a way that is socially responsible. There may also be a way for the health unit to recover some costs by charging some fees for offering VOIP (Voice over internet protocol) services such as the use of SKYPE or www.net2phone for contact. Think about how you might apply such a voluntary Robin Hood scheme. It's technically feasible. I have done it already on a small scale. In fact, this note comes to you via a wireless setup... Mark, interesting scheme. The most challenging part, I think, will be convincing the bank that sharing their bandwidth with a local health center will be a socially responsible thing to do, especially if they are aware that the health center will then turn around and use their new connected state to make money. I think even the banks will want to set up a monthly payment plan with the health center where the center pays for their bandwidth usage - even a nominal fee. Njideka Ugwuegbu Reuters Digital Vision Fellow Stanford University http://reuters.stanford.edu/ http://www.youthfortechnology.org 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
