Options for rural connectivity

[kose99]

Hi All,

I am abroad at the moment and I would like to get folks back home online so that we can stay in contact, but I am out of touch with broadband technology in SA.

They live in the Hartswater area, so it is rural (about 190 Km from Kimberley). I heard rumours of broadband connectivity via wireless towers (line-of-sight, I guess) being available there, but I am not 100% sure.

Does anybody have any idea which options they can pursue to get broadband? Satellite is one of course, but very expensive.

Regards,
Kose

 

[Surv0]

Tell Telkom to stop paying R25m a year on fines for not rollingout infrastructure into those areas and bloody go install some lines...

 

[kaspaas]

Depending on how rural it is, you might be able to use GPRS.

If they have cellphone reception, chances are excellent that they will have at least GPRS connectivity.

I'm using my cellphone as modem on trips into rural areas, and it works (usually) great.

 

[mancombseepgood]

Yeah - cell is the easiest.
As above - depends on how rural - name an area and someone may be able to answer more specifically. Otherwise use Google Earth and GE Community to pinpoint it, then tell us the name you gave it.

 

[Ekhaatvensters]

Well 190 km from kilberly is pretty rural..

but im shue there will be cell reception there, they could get HSDPA maby? Or is that not active on all cell towers or what?

Well GPRS will serve them at least, if not that then only sattelite will work.
There is a new sattelite service coming out that is pretty cheap for low usage so it could work out fine. It uses GPRS for upload though, so if you cant get GPRS i geuss you only have true sattelite to rely on, very expensive.

Well if you say broadband towers, maby there is a small WISP, but I doubt it for such a small place. You might be thinking of the new Iburst tower in Kimberley though.. but i doubt it, and that wont reach much over 20kms max.

 

[krycor]

The sat solution is usually 2 flavours that i've seen..

1. vsat/2-way solution, all inclusive/standalone BUT most solutions i've seen max out at 512/256? kbps and mostly contract binding. works by basically bouncing request to a satelite which bounces back to a earthstation(in Telkom/Sentch case near hartbeesdam). Usual rtt latency problems associated with sat links. For video calls, broadcast video etc this is the solution.. me thinks cnn etc use it too for those war/battlefield reports since it does not necessarily rely on infrastucture in the country but rather anywhere in the coverage area.

2. Older relay broadcast way, use one connection to send request and sat for downlink. Older way i've seen was mweb(no longer a product last i checked 2yrs ago) where you send request via ip netwrok of some sort and recieve on a sat link which can be very fast. Problem in a sense is that the uplink is usually criplingly slow compared to the downlink. Works by you send request thru network of your choice to base station elsewhere in country/other country, your info is retrieved and then push/broadcast on to sat link up and you recive on the downlink. The dial up one was siyanda or something like that but last i heard of them was like 4+yrs ago. The one thats come to light in another thread uses gprs as the uplink channel(remember to be realistic with gprs rates attainable at big distances..) but somethng else that i've ben thinking since i responded to the other thread is the whole rtt of this service. I mean at best gprs will be 550ms.. but at distance what 1100ms? and then you must also consider the sat link up and down. etc. That gprs solution has one advantage tho, its not as binding to a contract or bundled with a higher usage so entry level is more affordable(tho thru put comes to about current cell data rates/R1.5k for 3GB)

I have not used either services so i can't really comment on how good it is, just remember its like any shared resource, ie a contended channel thus cost is higher and usage charge is kinda required etc