The only reason why the rral areas are not covered in broadband is the same reason Zuku, Faiba and access kenya are not in mukuru kwa njenga and Githurai. The residents there have far pressing needs than paying for broadband. Thus in a purely commercial sense, there is little incentive for telecom companies(who are after profits not helping rural folk) to invest in the rural areas. 

This is where the government comes in with its regulations and steer the process of broadband proliferation to the end it desires.




On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 7:49 PM, Bernard Mwagiru <bmwagiru@gmail.com> wrote:

What particular skills would an engineer need to roll out a network in the rural area that would be peculiar to challenges already experienced elsewhere? Terrain notwithstanding.

Most of the reasons behind your explanation are more to do with regulation, policies, etc

./bernard

On Jan 29, 2013 7:41 PM, "John Gitau" <jgitau@gmail.com> wrote:
@bernard it's mainly engineering, i suspect skills will be an issue in rural areas and politics.....I wish we'd do a 4g spectrum auction and move on already... This consortium maneno doesn't seem to be working out.


The Germans did it so well the last time I was in some rural town they had LTE; how? simple, their 2010 spectrum auction that required mobile network operators to deploy LTE in the 800 MHz band in rural areas first before they could move on to bigger cities essentially meant rural areas got covered. And this has indeed been done as I noticed that LTE was available in many places where 3G was absent. 

In kenya, operators without 3G can just be allowed to roll out LTE in the same manner, give each a rural region to deploy first. It would be cheaper and rural broadband would be easily realised....

Jgitau

On 29 Jan 2013, at 19:18, Bernard Mwagiru <bmwagiru@gmail.com> wrote:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/how-bad-is-africas-internet

"Even in the more stable countries, such as Angola and Kenya, that have built hefty broadband backbones, engineers have yet to find a tried-and-true way to extend cheap, dependable Internet service to rural communities."

Is it really an engineering problem?

./bernard

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