Whether an allegation or a fact, I wish to give this a reasonably just response; with the individual consumer in mind: - If so then why does South Africa have 5,100,000 internet users, Nigeria 5 million, Egypt 5 million, Morocco 4.6 million while, with all fairness to the on-going Internet Market Study, Kenya has just 1 million users says http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats1.htm . Prohibitive costs are to blame, for example, the cheapest point-to-point access (without bandwidth) is US$ 125 per month. Add bandwidth costs and affordability and cost-benefits go out the window. Surely Nairobi's local point-to-point link costs have no relation "costly satellite internet". If the minister for finance were on this list, I would have pleaded he considers allocating Internet constituency dev. funds in the next budget if not to make outsourcing "accessible" to all communities throughout in Kenya. Utilising public, license-free ISM bands 2.4 and 5.8 GHz, WiFi promises one true way for most affordable access there being no license fee to anyone who wants to share their internet link and invoices with their neighbours - a wonderful ICT policy provision that opened up a hitherto "for licensed" internet airwaves. BTW, Australian scientists demonstrated 6 Giga/per second over WiFi This should interest you Brian! <snip> * The CSIRO ICT Centre today announced that it has achieved over six gigabits per second over a point to point wireless connection with the highest efficiency (2.4bits/s/Hz) ever achieved for such a system * At the demonstration, the team will transmit 16 simultaneous streams of DVD quality video over a 250 metre link with no loss of quality or delays Dr Jay Guo, Director of the Wireless Technologies Laboratory at CSIRO said that this breakthrough is just a first stage towards direct connections of up to 12 gigabits per second. < http://www.csiro.au/csiro/content/standard/ps2kj.html > <snip>
Public Safety, Disaster Recovery and Urban Transit applications:
see Celtel Malawi is still off air 5 days later, carriers should support emerging alternative communication infrastructure considering the Nairobi little tremor that incapacitated an otherwise wonderful point-to-point based infrastructure because we need these in disaster situations. /Alex Kai Wulff <kai.wulff@kdn.co.ke> wrote: Did you know that Nairobi has the biggest WIFI deployment in Africa? Rgds Kai --------------------------------- Don't be flakey. Get Yahoo! Mail for Mobile and always stay connected to friends.