Rural Internet (Contd.)

March 9, 2013 by greenskyindia 2 Comments

This post is in continuation to the problem expressed in a post by Sam Mason (Rural Internet). A very important point discussed there is that majority of development discussion and initiatives that we start online are hardly available to the target population. Working mostly online, we have started to take it as granted that this broadband internet speed will be available to everyone using internet. Web technologies are growing at a rate faster than ever. Thanks to platforms like Wordpres, Drupal etc., making a website for any purpose is easier than ever. There were times when we used to write entire html code (No CSS!!) and try hard to make the site beautiful (using marquee and blinks too!). Using images for site elements wasn’t a good option as the “dial-up” internet speed would take its whole long time to fetch a small image. Other useful media like audio or video were not even considered.

When broadband internet came, speeds took an instant shift from around ~44 kbps to 256 kbps. The web moved faster, and our hopes grew more. At least now images were not at all an issue. For videos, well we could always let them buffer and then see it all together later. Most of us still preferred some downloadable video over this buffering technique. So with increasing network speed, our demands changed all of a sudden. And as web developers, we had this plethora of elements to play with and make beautiful websites.

And now when on an average we have network speed of 2 Mbps available with us, the way web was used has changed. If we’re reading a long list of text we don’t create page1, page2 …page n. We just keep scrolling and scrolling. The very design of a site is now based on all time good speed internet connectivity. If you scrolled down too long and then just clicked something by mistake, a “back” won’t be that quick again. Same goes with You Tube videos. The “let it buffer” thing doesn’t work now. It has become smarter. If you don’t keep watching, it won’t buffer further. Yes sure this saves unnecessary extra download, but you can’t keep a video available at once with an option to view it little later.

This design is still very good and positive. We are ultimately going to move towards all time high speed internet only. But in developing countries, it doesn’t fit that nicely as of now. When we talk about development with the help of ICTs, user interface is one of the primary concerns. The more beautiful and illustrative it is, the better it can serve users. When we hope to educate and inform relatively low literate users via internet, we would prefer such interfaces. But a barrier here is that they don’t have access to good broadband speeds. And even if the network line is there, power availability is very low. How do they keep their modem working for long? If we try using Smartphone, then again GPRS speed is very low and 3G packages are too expensive. As important as it is to use rich media for development, we need to focus more on the underlying framework. Fighting this barrier of low speed internet and high prices of better speed is an important challenge. People like us working on development through ICT don’t quite have to authority to control prices in rural areas. But we sure can build technologies to somehow find the right mix. We need to consider every element of our target environment before designing technologies for them. Internet is definitely the most usable platform for ICTD, but its ‘speed’ is not too great in the rural areas. Let’s build dedicated technologies and use them practically in the available environment.