Internet Access in rural areas

[redR]

I'm working with an NGO that has branches all over the country, many in or close to rural areas. We've managed to get the offices in the cities on ADSL, the others are still using dial-up, and in most cases paying more than the ADSL users. However, Telkom doesn't offer ADSL to the rural areas as yet, and likely won't for some time.

Can anyone suggest other options for connectivity? Remember this is a non-profit so the budget is really tight. They mainly need to connect to a database that is hosted locally.

 

[Darth Garth]

Do they need to be online all the time to the database or can they be batched ???.

 

[bdt]

.. many in or close to rural areas.

Ah - *how* rural? There's rural as in the smallholding farmland pretty close to the cities and then there's waaaayy out in the boonies rural. Obviously you'd want to be closer to civilisation as it'd work out cheaper to get comms.

-bdt

 

[redR]

Ideally they should be online all the time for e-mail etc. but the main connectivity issue is for the database. So if other options are too expensive we may go with a batching option.

As for how rural... they're not way out there, usually the office is just set closer to a township rather than the city as that's where their clients live. But the free state office even had trouble getting landlines!

 

[mancombseepgood]

It all boils down to...

Amount of data going through the pipe.

Two scenarios...
if they have GPRS connectivity, then per meg billing is the way to go provided there is not alot of traffic to go thru the wire. You may want to set up a free proxy server on a "gateway" machine to help control potential abuse of the internet, or allow access to whitelist sites alone. OR.. use hamachi to VPN each other and only allow traffic to hamachi network addresses (http://www.hamachi.cc)

If your app is suitably developed, you can have minimum data travel through the wires. Or as Tibby suggested, they can batch upload, etc. on a schedule. GPRS is not bad provided you don't need to send huge volumes, and provided you can successfully police it/ prevent abuse (as it can get expensive). My feeling is that if employees know from the start that all data traffic is logged (company policy - not individual policing) they are not likely to abuse.

Also, make sure your service provider can put a rand value cap on the system just in case.

You would be surprised how much coverage gprs has.

 

[bdt]

You would be surprised how much coverage gprs has.

..d'oh! Of course, yea - quite right. I don't think of that first as I don't have a 3G/GPRS card, but now that you mention it, a pal o' mine got perfect reception on his 3G card on a small holding/small farm out Walkerville way ..where there's precious little choice for connectivity.

I was thinking in terms of wi-fi links to more central locations, but that's simply force of habit.
-bdt

 

[Moederloos]

must agree that GPRS is a good way to go.

Database transactions tend to be small, provided you are not pulling down entire recordsets for no reason (SELECT * FROM Customers as opposed to SELECT Surname from Customers WHERE IDNumber = '12345' LIMIT 10; for eg).

 

[bdt]

..so the budget is really tight.

Well, maybe consider getting Vodacom to sell you those 3G cards they're offering R400 exchange on for people upgrading to the new HSDPA cards.. (and if you DO somehow manage to magically pull that off, lemme know so I can buy one pls?!)
-bdt

 

[i-Guru]

RBGAN, is a new portable VSAT solution for rural areas. It looks like a INMARSAT phone, but is only used for internet. One can obtain speeds of up to 150kpbs on it currenlty, there will be faster speeds availible soon.
This is currently being targeted for rural africa, and said to be the next best thing to sliced bread. Africa does not have billing platform for it yet, therefore prices are still in US$