OER ACHIEVEMENTS, CHALLENGES, AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES
infrastructure could be installed across the entire province for a capital cost of about $2.5 million. VSAT broadband leases (one per commune) cost $900 per year for 2 Mbps down and 0.5 Mbps up, amounting to less than $1 per household per year.[1] AusAID is supporting the project because it sees a potential provincial infrastructure model for national scaling. In addition, the Connexions project has expressed interest, since its partnership with the Vietnam Education Ministry is already in place and province-scale rural broadband access that could be applied to educational purposes does not otherwise exist in the country. There is also a nascent local software industry, and Intel is building a chip factory in Vietnam. The combination of these features may make Vietnam, still a relatively poor country, an interesting and fruitful laboratory for new, IT-based educational approaches.
For reasons advanced earlier, a number of other countries may also provide useful venues—the Philippines, South Africa, and any of several countries in Latin America.
- ↑ The VOIP traffic will be managed with a “soft” switch residing on a PC that requires less than a second to establish a connection; for local calls, the traffic then stays within the local Wi-Fi network and does not transit the VSAT link. The result is that approximately 1,000 households, a commune average, can share the VSAT bandwidth with little difficulty as long as VOIP is the main application and call volume remains modest (likely, these are agricultural communities). Additional VSAT links could be added when demand warrants.
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