Re: Contextualized software, cost of download

> 1. I'm happy to be informed that this  group has experts who can advise
> others how to create culturally-appropriate local content.

I'm sure there are lots of people who have experience, and are aware of 
the importance of the cultural relevance of applications and contents.
But i'm not sure if it is possible to have expertise in creating 
culturally-relevant context everywhere ! :)

> 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.

While i believe you are right, i do hope that we could move from the 
situation today (almost 0% of Web content from Africa ) to a world where 
  the availability of local content will grow quickly.
I hope we would identify the key barriers for that to happen.

> 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.

This was exactly my original point. The two aspects are largely 
unrelated and we have to look at the two aspects: how to bring content 
from the web to unconnected people owning a mobile phone, and how to 
leverage development of local content.

> 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 ?

you can have both packet-based for 2g and above network, time-based for GSM.
Btw, in europe, US, japan (since long time), you see now flat-rate 
florishing.

Best
Stephane


-- 
Stephane Boyera		stephane@w3.org
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Received on Monday, 23 June 2008 16:34:28 UTC