I spent a month all over Brazil, and, while it was painful trying to work from some areas near Belem - it was either 80kbits+/second on GPRS or no connectivity whatsoever.
Just off the top of my head, rural Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.
Solutions tried by people I know (all since 2005)
* Satalite radio (helps with downlink but uplink is still via modem) * Pay $700/mo for 1.5mb commercial T1 (1.5MBps). Took the ISP 3 days to do the line engineering from the CO. * Long distance point to point wifi (@2.4GHz ~1mile and 800Mhz 10+ miles) * HAM radio packet networking. Slow but fun * Running 1/2 mile+ of Ethernet cable (with inline repeaters) through the woods and hoping no one messes with them * Combinationa of the above.
Hisghspeed Internet access in rural/hilly areas is a major challange. We pay a few dollars every month on our phone bills as a special state tax to fund the ISPs to provide it. Have for years. still a problem.
For a good couple of years visiting my parents in inland South Africa (just outside the major sprawl of the PWV), I was regularly seeing 1 to 2kbps speeds on dial up modem. South Africa only has one phone company, Telkom.
The price of copper affects the quality of the telephone lines. We live in an area that's quickly growing, but the availability of copper is low. So there's shared telephone lines, which creates noise, which slows down modem connections.
Yeah, they can string out more copper cables to work through the shared lines, but when those copper cables disappear as quickly as they are put up, it is very difficult to make progress. Copper theft in South Africa is big.
And the shared telephone lines are deemed acceptable because Telkom support it only for telephone calls, not modem connections. They are reluctant to fix things that are not broken.
So landlines are effectively useless in fast growing areas, there's not enough copper cable to go around to give people a decent clear line to a dial-up ISP, let alone broadband.
I've moved my parents over to mobile broadband now, with a Mifi device that appeared on the market last year, so those download speeds are hopefully a thing of the past.
Essentially, developing countries need to skip their subpar landlines and invest heavily in mobile broadband abilities. They can't afford the long term cost of replacing copper cables over and over and over.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/09/23/british-t...