How will John Gage’s proposal play out in the telecom eco-system of developing countries?   Who will operate them?   Will they suffer the same fate as ICTA’s  VSAT based connectivity for telecenters, where you can do  Internet but cannot call the next village?

Can you just drop technology in, without addressing the overall institutional setting?     

At Davos, the Squabble Resumes on How to Wire the Third World – New York Times

Separately at the meeting on Saturday, John Gage, the chief researcher at Sun Microsystems, proposed an industry plan to deploy advanced data networks in developing economies with contributions of engineering staff time of 1 percent.

Mr. Gage, who headed the NetDay project for connecting American schools to the Internet, said that rural areas in the developing world would cost as little as a $1,000 a kilometer, compared with $1 million to deploy a network over the same distance in New York City.