— Jim

A couple comments on your comments:

2. Yes, larger networks require more organization than smaller nets, and usually benefit from a commercial structure or at least a formal co-op. Backbones Networks are important and require more planning, finance, maintenance, contracts for use, etc., but usally Access Networks are a large share of the total cost of networks, so lowering their cost is criticial. (We’ll save the African International bandwidth pricing issues for another time

3. Yes, in the situations you describe you could use one technology within the housing estate (such as wires or mesh wifi), and then a slightly different technology to connect the estate to the nearest backbone (point to point WiFi with bigger antennae, maybe WiMax, maybe fiber if you’re incredibly lucky or a University campus, or maybe Cellular EvDO/3G/HSPDA — whatever works.

1. The “build your own network” phenomenon is exactly what we’ve seen in the local universities – students building their own dorm LANs to hook up self-owned computers in their rooms. Coz the administration networks never get to the stage of the dorms. Melvin presented the JKUAT setup during BarCamp.
http://skunkworks-ke.blogspot.com/2007/03/post-barcamp-nairobi-kenya-31st-march.html

2. In my personal opinion – doing estates, apartment blocks etc is very easy. And a good business model too (see the section also on residential networks we covered at BarCamp – pity we’ve not pushed it further). The technology exists (mesh WiFi like FON is great for this, or just simple cabling).
The problem comes about in scaling up this network to the city or metro scale – and that’s hard to manage technically, as well as commercially (for a small entity). ie the part about linking all these community networks together.
The technology has limitations – mesh WiFi doesn’t work on a metro scale as proven all over the world … you’re looking at fiber, or more dedicated pipes.

3. Much of Kenya’s topology makes it not so favorable for larger community networks – we have estates where houses are close to each other – these are perfect for FON-type networks. But then each estate is far away from the other (more than 200m) and this makes it a challenge. Also, the individual compounds with big trees are almost impossible to cover.
However, suitable areas are places like BuruBuru, Eastleigh, Parklands to an extent, and CBD.

4. So – if many private companies decided to build their own & link them together ? Perfect. But in the past, this has just ended up creating a horribly fragmented market where everyone targets the same regions. So you get 10 networks in the same place – and they just kill each other. That’s why the smaller estate idea in point 2 works better. Then what you do is have a larger metro ISP or municipality providing the “backbone”.
Bits of this is actually happening in Mombasa … I know several individuals offering cheap 5,000 internet access held together by “strings”. But it’s very frustrating internet

5. I’ve never thought about the issue of licensing for such networks – from BarCamp – one might need to get a CCK license for something like a WiFi access-point for your neighbourhood ?

6. The txt messages is quite common … but how it works is again a loong explanation

Bankelele – interesting! Yeah unsolicited upselling it could have been… surprisingly i wasn’t too worried about privacy (more about the technical ‘how do they do it’. still wondering…)

As for FON movimiento it offers a great model, since it is able to monetize the networks and generate $ for the people who set them up. Hmmm hadn’t thought of Fon. similar i think. Btw, i did get their free router but the connection kept on hanging, I gave it away.