In general, rural areas in Africa are seen as unprofitable by operators and hence
these areas do not benefit from typical wired Internet access. Due to the cost
involved, only a small number of people in Africa benefit from the Internet. On the
other hand, the Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) has thoroughly
penetrated Africa and in many cases unutilized capacity exists in rural areas. Since
the cost of GSM services is still extremely high when compared to the average
income of African communities, many organizations are now considering alternative
business models for the provision of Internet access to disadvantaged populations.
To try to bridge the digital divide, the aim of this contribution is to show that basic but
affordable Internet Protocol (IP) connectivity can be provided to rural communities by
using spare capacity on GSM networks to carry Wireless Local Area Network
(WLAN) traffic. Since the main problem with WLAN in Africa is not the last mile, but
rather finding a way to connect the wireless access point to an existing backbone
network, a solution to integrate WLAN with GSM is proposed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:tut/oai:encore.tut.ac.za:d1001076 |
| Date | 01 March 2007 |
| Creators | Chatelain, D |
| Contributors | Van Wyk, BJ |
| Publisher | Tshwane University of Technology |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | |
| Rights | Tshwane University of Technology |
| Relation | Electronic Letters & French South African Technical Institute in Electronics |
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