Rural Comms

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Comment by Brendan Dunphy on January 15, 2010 at 7:59am

See The Guardian article 'Are mobiles phones' Africa's silver bullet?' at http://www.guardian.co.uk/katine/katine-chronicles-blog/2010/jan/14/mobile-phones-africa

Comment by Kalyan Medapati on July 20, 2009 at 3:01pm

The problem I noticed leading to very low internet penetration in Africa is the lack of international bandwidth, and the absence of national backhaul networks connecting communities. This problem is now being addressed, partly by public initiatives but mostly by market forces. http://tiny.cc/H5l2x .

With a lot of foreign capital flowing into African telecoms (no shortage of M&A activity in the region) – low penetrations in densely populated urban areas will be alleviated sooner. The wireless operators are taking the initiatives and building their own national backhaul networks. But for them to connect every single rural community doesn’t make business sense. So the remote rural communities will continue to suffer, unless there are enough public initiatives. Perhaps not at the access network level, but the governments (public-private partnerships) need to make sure that their rural communities are connected via a national terrestrial backhaul networks – a combination of microwave links and fibre optics depending on the terrain. This will allow smaller private players (profit or non profit) to build viable business models for rural access networks.

Comment by Brendan Dunphy on June 16, 2009 at 7:51am

http://www.africanews.com/site/Nokia_Siemens_to_bridge_urbanrural_divide/list_messages/25454

Do initiatives such as these go far enough?

"Nokia Siemens Networks has pledged its commitment to enhancing the rolling out of information technologies in rural areas around Africa.

“Across the world, wireless technologies are helping service providers break through traditional access barriers in rural areas to bring consumers in these areas into the digital fold. I-HSPA allows the benefits of broadband and wireless access to be combined and extended as a robust service, “said Richard Kitts, customer business team head at Nokia Siemens Networks.

He added: “It also brings significant operational benefits to service providers and is thus the right choice for initiatives such as this.”
Rural areas, particularly in Africa have lagged behind over the years in terms of ICT infrastructure.

Nokia Siemens Networks is the forerunner in flat architecture solutions with its I-HSPA, Direct Tunnel and LTE platforms, helping operators to increase the efficiency of the mobile broadband networks, to cope with data explosion by lowering cost per gigabyte and to effectively serve their subscribers’ needs and covering new areas and customer segments."

Comment by Brendan Dunphy on June 12, 2009 at 8:12am

A good indication of the scale of the cost challenge to provide rural comms from a recent global benchmark of mobile opertaors by Strategy Analytics:

"Meanwhile operating expenses (global) averaged $12.15 per subscriber per month, down 10% on last year. Opex was naturally lower in emerging markets, with nine operators reporting costs of below $2 per subscriber. Operators from Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines and Sri Lanka had the lowest costs per subscriber."