User guide

1. About this document
This material is part of the course package created for TRICALCAR project. For information on
TRICALCAR, please consult the introductory module or, www.wilac.net/tricalcar/. This material was
originally produced in Spanish for the TRICALCAR project. This unit is available under the terms of the
Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (Creative Commons licences:
http://creativecommons.org/).
David Rowe for his contribution to the 2nd Edition of the VoIP-4D Primer with the IP04 architecture and
the role of open hardware in developing regions (Appendix B).
This work was carried out with the aid of a grant from the Acacia Initiative of the International
Development Research Centre of Canada.
1.1 Degrees of difficulty
The degree of difficulty of this unit is “intermediate”.
1.2 Information about the icons
In this unit you will find 5 icons with the following meaning:
Central concept Important practice
recommended
Exercise Intelectual
property
Intelectual
property
2. Introduction
Although WiFi technology was designed for local area networks, its impact in developing countries is
more dramatic in long-distance applications.
In developed countries, fiber optics cables offering large bandwidths have been installed satisfying the
communication needs of most cities. Converseley, the penetration of optical fiber in the developing
world is not enough to cover the needs, and the cost of its expansion often does not meet the ROI
(Return on Investment) goals of telcos within a reasonable period of time.
Wireless technologies, on the other hand, have been successful in developing countries. Suffice to say
that in Latin America mobile telephony penetration exceeds 50% across the region, and in some
countries it is higher than 70%. This fact shows that infrastructure costs are considerably lower when
cables are not required, specially in sparsely populated areas.
Page 4 TRICALCAR | www.wilac.net/tricalcar – Version: February 2008