Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-28 Thread Don Richardson
Edward, Would broadband imply a higher ROI? Not necessarily. The margins for rural service are always tight. Every incremental cost counts, including the cost of a basic payphone set. Rural ROI is highly dependent on willingness and ability to pay for services offered. Rural customers are very

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-26 Thread Don Osborn
Njideka, This is an interesting initiative and the notion of scanning handwritten letters is a nice innovation as it permits a more direct communication of content. It's not clear from your third point, 3) The youth agents will have a customized form they will use to document the message(s).

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-24 Thread Yacine Khelladi
Simon Woodside wrote: I would say rather that the different technologies that are available are so different and so randomly effective it's impossible to say that either low-bandwidth or high-bandwidth is better. Maybe it is because we are thinking upside down? We should not first look at the

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-20 Thread C Ray Carlson
Vicram Crishna wrote: Today, villager's messages are being delivered on paper to an Internet Cafe and then transcribed into email for delivery worldwide by someone who holds an email account. This reminds me of my first encounter with the Internet in 1992 when I visited the Nicholas

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-19 Thread Njideka Ugwuegbu
I am a Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford and the focus of my work is to develop a rural messaging service that will give villagers a voice to the world. What I am proposing is a youth-led process to help villagers that don't use computers or the Internet, but want to communicate with their loved

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-17 Thread Richard Koman
Sorry for piping up without an intro, but I just returned from Uganda. There community radio stations offer an email service to rural listeners. Friends can email you care of the radio station and, at a designated time, the radio will alert everyone who has received an email. The charge for

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-17 Thread Venkatesh (Venky) Hariharan
In India, we have the public call offices (PCOs) -- essentially manned telephone booths where the revenues are shared between the telco and the PCO operator. There are more than 600,000 of these PCOs across the country. There are many Community Information Centres where one can access the Internet

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-14 Thread Robert Miller
Regarding Tony Roberts' reply to Simon Woodside: Simon Woodside wrote: Not only that, but the high cost of a PC or a laptop needs to be considered. A PC is expensive, whether it's connected to high-bandwidth or low. So a substantial sum of the total ICT investment isn't going to change no

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-14 Thread Wasserman, Herman
Cliff, this is a very interesting line of argument -- if this way of using the internet through an intermediary is a general practice in Africa because of the lack of connectivity, it might mean amending some of the theories of Internet communication from the idea of the Internet as a many-to-one

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-14 Thread John Lawrence
Since much of the Internet technology (laptops, telecentres etc) seems to be landline based, yet it is cellular telephony that is flourishing in many of the less developed countries, is there a 'disconnect' here that may be inhibiting the spread of the Internet to rural areas?...I just came back

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-14 Thread Edmond Gaible
Hello, I'm happy to hear Stuart Gannes' voice on alternative means of connectivity. Stuart's Digital Vision program has been instrumental in, among many other activities, promoting the use of store-and-forward models as a way to deliver information services in advance of reliable connectivity.

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-13 Thread Cecilia Matanga
The GKD Moderator has asked: 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? My name is

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-13 Thread S Woodside
On Wednesday, November 12, 2003, Pam McLean wrote: Ben Parker asked about experiences on solar powered VSAT I don't have time to give details now but can't let the question go by without brief reference to the Solo. It is designed for rural Africa. I saw the second generation prototype

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-12 Thread Duran, Jorge
My name is Jorge Duran and i work as Senior Technology for Development Advisor at the InterAmerican Agency for Cooporation and Development of the Organization of American States in Washington, DC. The Moderator has asked: 3. Can information distribution centers (e.g., public access

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-12 Thread S Woodside
On Monday, November 10, 2003, Ben Parker wrote: The other major challenge we face in two remote telecentres UNICEF supports in southern Sudan (at least two days from the nearest telephone) is the generators. These need lots of fuel and oil and are prone to breakdown. Regular desktops are much

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-12 Thread Tony Roberts
Simon Woodside wrote: Not only that, but the high cost of a PC or a laptop needs to be considered. A PC is expensive, whether it's connected to high-bandwidth or low. So a substantial sum of the total ICT investment isn't going to change no matter what the bandwidth plan might be. I would beg

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-12 Thread pam.mclean
Ben Parker asked about experiences on solar powered VSAT I don't have time to give details now but can't let the question go by without brief reference to the Solo. It is designed for rural Africa. I saw the second generation prototype during field trials in Oke-Ogun. I undertand that some

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-12 Thread Cliff Missen
Right, Peter! You've extended my argument yet another step past the ICT solution (where I had chosen to end my examples at the border of ICT and non-ICT solutions), and I entirely agree. You can still go into markets in much of the developing world and find someone whose business it is to write

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-11 Thread S Woodside
On Friday, November 7, 2003, at 08:26 AM, Cornelio Hopmann wrote: Hence: if the alternative is to connect many (and through-out the country) by low-bandwidth or a few with megabyte links, go for the first. The latter will come -almost by itself- as technology costs fall and demand increases.

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-10 Thread mahmudd
Wire Lunghabo James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: However I would also like to add that many times when we talk of connectivity, we mean having probably a connection to either the internet directly or to the telcos etc. Has some one ever thought of creating a network of villages linked together

[GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-10 Thread Meddie Mayanja
Dear All, I am Meddie Mayanja, working for the World Bank Institute. I wanted to contribute to the debate in the context of my experience in the ICTs for Development and my current position. 1. Are high-bandwidth connections necessary, or even important, to making a real impact on

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-10 Thread Ben Parker
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? 1. High bandwidth: I think enough to do Yahoo! mail or

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-07 Thread Cornelio Hopmann
I would like to throw in my 20 ounces of salt ... and support Pam McLean. Stories from my life: When changing the German National Research Center for Computing in 1985 for the Engineering University of Nicaragua I felt like I was transported to the moon - dark side. Whereas in Germany I had

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-06 Thread Sandra Roberts
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

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-06 Thread Mark Lediard
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

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-06 Thread Njideka Ugwuegbu
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

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-05 Thread Matt Blair
Mr. James, Regarding your last question about linking villages via wireless, you may want to check in with the Jhai Foundation. They have been creating WiFi networks to link villages with each other and the internet in Laos. The project website is:

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-04 Thread Wire Lunghabo James
Hi List, I will attempt to provide my views on the questions posed: 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

[GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

2003-11-03 Thread Global Knowledge Dev. Moderator
Dear GKD Members, Last week GKD members provided a number of cases that described how connectivity is being established and used in countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, Mauritania, Uganda, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Kenya, Panama, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Iraq, Philippines, Pakistan,