By Jason Kohn, Contributing Columnist

State-of-the-art broadband services still don’t reach many parts of the African continent, especially rural villages. But one consumer technology is pervasive: cell phones.

According to the Cisco VNI Service Adoption Forecast, there will be 1.3 billion consumer mobile devices across the Middle East and Africa by 2016 – a billion of them being basic feature phones, not smartphones. At the same time, mobile video is expected to be the fastest-growing service in the region, with 184 million users projected by 2016.

Read More »

Tags: africa, healthcare, ICT4D, mobile video, rural, vni, VNI-SA

By Howard Baldwin, Contributing Columnist

One of the challenging issues about deploying broadband – so they say – is the cost. Access rights. Construction. Lawsuits. All have an effect on time and resources. That’s why it was particularly startling when I started finding references to communities that had found ways to deploy broadband using creative financing and cost structures.

For instance, as noted in Laying Fiber: Creative Broadband Installations, the city of Santa Monica used federal stimulus funds and then partnered with other telecommunications companies. As Broadband Communities’ article Santa Monica City Net: How to Grow a Network notes, the city leased a fiber network from a local cable TV operator.

Read More »

Tags: broadband, capex, creativity, financing, government, infrastructure, rural

By Steven Shepard, Contributing Columnist

Wikipedia defines it as “A perverse effect contrary to what was originally intended.” It turns out that the law of unintended consequences is alive and well, and has been for years in the world of telecommunications.

Consider the story of the woman who called the telephone company back in the 1940s to report a problem. The problem, it seemed, was that every time the phone rang, her dog shrieked and barked and did the canine equivalent of St. Vitus’ dance.

Read More »

Tags: electricity, grounding, insulation, rural, telecommunications, telephone network

By Howard Baldwin, Contributing Columnist

Sometimes those promoting extensive infrastructure projects — broadband or otherwise — exhibit a Field of Dreams mentality: “If you build it, they will come.” My own state of California is currently wrestling with such a project, a $68 billion high-speed rail line that opponents claim is too expensive and will never pay for itself. My attitude: come the day we have to evacuate San Francisco or Los Angeles after a major earthquake, people are going to be grateful it was built.

As we recently discussed in Broadband Backlash: Where It Comes From and How to Fix It, broadband deployments also have their detractors. Currently, one of the biggest areas of contention swirls around the value of rural broadband. There are really two sides of the story.

Read More »

Tags: broadband, economy, infrastructure, investment, rural, stimulus, urban

By Lionel Walters,  Guest Columnist

Some of the most compelling memories I have from my school years involve trips away to see amazing things, or special visits to the school by amazing people. I still have vivid memories of the sights, sounds and even smells of some of the fascinating places we went to, and I can still feel the butterflies in my stomach as I met my favourite author and had him personally autograph some of my most treasured books.

To me, what made these experiences successful was that they lifted my sights and gave me something to aspire to. Unfortunately for many students living in rural areas, these boundary-breaking experiences are few and far between, either because of funding constraints or simply the lack of appropriate people or places to see.

Read More »

Tags: Dallas Clayton, education, rural, rural broadband, service adoption, Tasmania, video conferencing, vni, VNI-SA