Re: Contextualized software, cost of download

On Mon, 23 Jun 2008 10:38:07 +0200, Stephane Boyera wrote

> Lots of university i know in Africa are largely involved in trying 
> to help rural communities, developing projects and so on. so i'm 
> sure that such a kiosk solutions would surely be of primary interest 
> for them.
I'm glad to hear that.

 
> a larger problem which is the lack of local 
> content. Why the international bandwidth is so expensive in e.g. 
> Africa ? First of all,  because of the unbalanced aspect of the 
> communication 
> (content going from one side to the other always the same direction)
> . So if there were more local content [...] it would 
> reduce the need of the international bandwidth. At the end, it might 
> also happen that the communications would be more balanced,
>  decreasing the cost of the bandwidth. [...]
> My hope is that this group will work on identifying these different 
> aspects that would create an enabling context.
1. I'm happy to be informed that this  group has experts who can advise
others how to create culturally-appropriate local content.
2. OTOH, I bet that for at least the next 15-ish years (that's well past
my remaining professional lifetime), the traffic will remain unbalanced
with substantially more data flowing into, than out of, Africa.
3. Traffic balancing and thus more (and cheaper) international bandwidth
will not necessarily translate into cheaper connections for end users.
These two types of charges are determined by different operators,
and I see no obvious mechanism why lowering one set of charges would
trigger the same effect for the other.
4. Talking about internet on mobile phones: I know the charging structure
of 4 European operators, and they all charge per kbyte, not per second,
for Internet access. So the location of the download site, or the 'line' speed
 is irrelevant.  Is the pricing in, say, Africa based on the 
connection time ?
5. Whether one pays per kb or per second, the size of the download
does matter.  Therefore may be providers of free software could be
encouraged not to create 'one size fits all' packages, with support
for tens of languages, dozens of fonts, skins &c.  I understand this means
creating versions for 'us' and 'them', but, if as a result,  'they' 
can get a tailored package more cheaply, I see nothing wrong with that.
Another step in the technical direction: may be e.g. African universities
could produce (and cache/distribute locally) these 'localised' packages?

Janusz Lukasiak

Received on Monday, 23 June 2008 13:49:06 UTC