South African Wireless Community Networks - Rural Wireless Community Networks

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:

    Once wealth and beauty are gone, there is always rural life.
    Mason Cooley (b. 1927)

    I do not mean to imply that the good old days were perfect. But the institutions and structure—the web—of society needed reform, not demolition. To have cut the institutional and community strands without replacing them with new ones proved to be a form of abuse to one generation and to the next. For so many Americans, the tragedy was not in dreaming that life could be better; the tragedy was that the dreaming ended.
    Richard Louv (20th century)

    The great networks are there to prove that ideas can be canned like spaghetti. If everything ends up by tasting like everything else, is that not the evidence that it has been properly cooked?
    Frederic Raphael (b. 1931)