Last summer, Olga Khroustaleva had an internship with the ITU in Geneva. Her duties included, in part, maintaining a database of ICT initiatives.

Zhengfei Liu was an intern last summer with a Chinese Government agency, introducing training programs, amongst other duties.

Background:

US has had many years of relative economic prosperity. Deregulated markets in telecommunications. Crazy boom where everyone was digging up the streets laying fiber. Lots of infrastructure (though not universal). Much of hte developed world is actually ahead of the US. Korea, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe actually all have denser high speed internet access. But down the scale, Rwanda has satellite terminals, but no domestic fiber infrastructure. No land lines because copper is valuable and expensive. Country racked by war so investments don't go to infrastructure because people are focused on staying alive. Public policy there and throughout parts of world where phone system is run by government and therefore runs in a way that doesn't always aim at providing mass uncontrolled access to all interested parties. These differences show up in how internet accvess looks. Network access can be very expensive because infrastructure isn't there to get bandwidth in and out of the country.

What access? First article is an HTML book on internet access in Eastern Europe.

• http://www.cdt.org/international/ceeaccess/
• http://www.gapminder.org/

The third session of SI 575 looks at public access to internet and communications technologies internationally. We will discuss a full range of issues that come up when providing telecommunications and computing services in parts of the world where incomes are low, power supplies are intermittent, infrastructure is inadequate and international connections are expensive.

There is no outside speaker currently planned for this session, but there are several class members with experience outside of the US who will describe some situations they have experienced.

This is a particularly interesting combination -

There is a peer-to-peer lending system called Prosper, kind of like eBay for loans. A social entrepreneur has guaranteed a loan to a Ugandan Interent service provider for capital equipment, and is borrowing the money for it on Prosper. The loan right now is at 8% interest and dropping.

Andy Peterson is back from Nicaragua and the telecenter project there as part of MAP. The president of Nicaragua spoke at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for one of the centers. He had some good words about his experiences at the CIC lunch, including the challenges of managing finances at centers that had money dumped on them without corresponding fiscal help.

You can view his photos at