Three days ago, Vodafone revealed a new product in Mumbai, India designed specifically to serve the millions of mobile subscribers
living in rural parts of the country with limit access to electricity.
The average Chinese household lives on a quarter of the income that American and Western European households do, and standards of living remain very
low in rural parts of the country, and across central and western China.
Ira Longini, a modeler at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and his colleagues simulated an imaginary population of 500,000
people in a rural part of the country; Michael Ferguson of Imperial College London built a model based on the 85 million people living in Thailand and a 100 - kilometer - wide border zone in neighboring countries.
To make that happen, the commission voted to pour an additional $ 1.5 billion a year into the E-rate, as well as to approve a series of rule changes aimed at spurring more competition among
telecoms in rural parts of the country.
The FCC plan is a positive development, but it needs to be coupled with additional steps to increase competition for smaller communities, according to Free Press, a digital advocacy group that has fought for greater
competition in rural parts of the country.