The first speaker at Freedom to Connect this morning was Dave Hughes with some wonderful pictures of a wireless ISP that he helped set up in the Myagdi district in Nepal, and then a live Skype connection with <Mahabir Pun in Nepal. The ISP is Nepal Wireless and one of the primary motivations for the network is to facilitate education, i.e. to support things like the Himanchal Education Foundation.
The voice quality varied from excellent to marginal (it sounded like dropped packets to me) and there was substantial latency as the Internet link between the US and Nepal included at least two satellite hops and the serialization delay of 64 kbps connectivity on the second link. But still, it was very good and the latency only affected the initial conversation between Dave and Mahabir. When Mahabir was explaining his network to the F2C audience, latency didn't matter and the wideband audio of Skype made the voice quality better than one would get from a traditional telephone link.
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