Originally Posted by jyossarian
Awesome. I need to have good ideas like that. Local incumbent carriers don't bother to wire up remote areas because of the huge capital investment. In the U.S., the incumbents are required to wire remote areas and can subsidize part of the investment by using the Universal Service Fund (USF on your phone bill), but that doesn't exist in all parts of the world. I wonder how they pay for the huge costs of satellite links...possibly by charging for long distance calls?
It would be possible to use it for a intra-country setup only, with no uplink to the outside world...
256kbps upstream satellite connections are still expensive, over $700 US dollars a month.
A few weeks ago I ran across an article about cellphone networks in Africa. One entrepeneur in a small isolated town discovered he could get a signal from the closest cellular tower if he climbed 60 feet up a large tree. He built a ladder and platform, and opened a business selling phone calls by the minute to anyone who could climb his tree.