Rural Wireless Community Networks
Although the city-based community networks are typically run by hobbyists who may be primarily interested in experimenting with technology and avoiding high broadband charges while playing Internet games, they serve also as test beds for more serious projects and training grounds for wireless network engineers that may benefit projects in poor rural and informal communities. In these communities, wireless mesh networks may have great medical, educational and economic value, giving affordable telephone and internet access when coupled with initiatives such as One Laptop per Child that aim to provide low-cost devices - assuming the regulator continues to remove obstacles to deploying WiFi community networks.
Read more about this topic: South African Wireless Community Networks
Famous quotes containing the words rural, community and/or networks:
“What life is best?
Courts are but only superficial schools
To dandle fools:
The rural parts are turned into a den
Of savage men:
And where ‘s a city from all vice so free,
But may be termed the worst of all the three?”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
“The poorest children in a community now find the beneficent kindergarten open to them from the age of two-and-a-half to six years. Too young heretofore to be eligible to any public school, they have acquired in their babyhood the vicious tendencies of their own depraved neighborhoods; and to their environment at that tender age had been due the loss of decency and self-respect that no after example of education has been able to restore to them.”
—Virginia Thrall Smith (1836–1903)
“The community and family networks which helped sustain earlier generations have become scarcer for growing numbers of young parents. Those who lack links to these traditional sources of support are hard-pressed to find other resources, given the emphasis in our society on providing treatment services, rather than preventive services and support for health maintenance and well-being.”
—Bernice Weissbourd (20th century)