I enjoyed reading your post, Peter, as my organization, Youth for Technology Foundation, is currently exploring some of these possibilities.
The shared bandwidth problem is never as easy as it sounds to implement. In Nigeria, this is the so-called revenue generating model of several cybercafes - rural or urban. The problem, though, is that the primary subscribers of the VSAT oversubscribe their service out to other neighboring subscribers (other internet cafe's, businesses etc). At the end of the day, the service of secondary subscribers is incredibly bad, but the primary subscriber gets the revenue at the end of the month regardless of the service quality. Njideka Ugwuegbu Harry Founder/Executive Director Youth for Technology Foundation email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] phone/U.S: 425-681-3920 phone/Nigeria: 8038665843 web: http://www.youthfortechnology.org On Thursday, January 6, 2005, Peter Baldwin wrote: > We are working with exactly the model that Jeff Buderer described: a > central VSAT, with the connection shared by many through a local > wireless network. We have found that it is economically feasible on > paper at least, and are in the process of rolling out such systems in > several locations in Mali. The relevant constraint is how to share the > bandwidth with enough people (meaning, efficiently) to make it > affordable for each one without completely bogging down transfer speeds. > (It is a classic maximization problem: maximize number of subscribers, > subject to a bandwidth constraint.) ..snip... ------------ ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization*** 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 Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
