High bandwidth access expands worldwide, finally in Africa too, but in many places the connectivity does not allow for an easy Internet usability, let alone the use of many tools for publishing own content and interacting easily with other users. Aside from many other challenges, one important to remark is the lack of low bandwidth application. This might be one of the reasons of why particular localization of many languages is progressing slowly. More importantly, the need for high bandwidth access for most current websites creates new divides.
Some examples
- Checking up a profile on Facebook or at least access the log in page, which has alone almost 800kb! In a cybercafe, where you have to pay fees per minute, it may take up to 3 minutes with a dial up modem connection.
- Video or audio upload is almost impossible with a low bandwidth connection and can cost you a lot when your tariff is measured in volume instead of time.
- This blog is based on Wordpress, which is a great open source tool, but unfortunately not made for a dial up connections. If you want to publish a new post on Wordpress (2.7.1), you have to download over 750kb first.
Unfortunately even the free and open source community has little activity around low bandwidth solutions.
Where are the low bandwidth solutions?
One really great initiative is Maneno, which not only tries to provide a low bandwidth blogging solution in Africa, but also focuses on offering multilingual options emphasising on various African languages such as Bamanankan and Swahili, beside French, English, Arabic and Portuguese. I got in contact with Maneno recently and their team ensured me that their system is designed as low as 13 kb without images and 33 kb including images.
Another one is Dgroups, a community platform based on emails. I am currently working on a project for IICD, which has over 50.000 members worldwide. Dgroups has just been newly launched and it now offers the administration of groups solely by email.
Twitter can make a difference as it lets you send and receive messages via mobile phone. But, unfortunately, Twitter gave up its free SMS service a while ago. I asked one of the Twitter founders, Jack Dorsey, at the e-stats conference when the free service is coming back, to which he replied ‘on mid year.’ This leaves the question, ‘what can be said in 140 characters?’ Quite a lot when you look at the Mobile Voices project just featured by the Netsquared N2Y2 challenge.
But one thing is for sure, just because you only have low bandwidth connection, does not mean you want to see dull, text based websites. There are various ways to make websites look appealing and still reduce the data size considerable. Aptivate has excellent Web Design Guidelines for Low Bandwidth.
What is the difference with mobile phones?
Low-bandwidth is a big topic for mobile phones as 3G is not everywhere available; in Africa it is only available in big cities. In many cases all information exchange is limited to SMS exchange solutions. There are different solutions that need to deal with the heavy loaded web. One such is the Opera mini browser, which tries to compress data as much as possible, compressing up to 90% according to a presentation at the W3C Maputo meeting.
UPDATE
There was an interesting discussion on the KM4DEV mailing list and here is a summary of key points.
UPDATE 2
Jonathan Goshier has a great and critical blog post around this topic and emphasis the importance of local services: Web 2.0 Services Shutting Out Developing Countries
Related posts:
- From global to local: Mobile, mapping and action Location, mobile phones and the Internet, combined together, are becoming...
- Culture of social networks in Africa on the example of trade There are over one billion Internet users worldwide according to a...
- The many potential channels for mobile services There is a wide variety of information and communication technologies,...
- The race to map Africa and ethical issues around online mapping I started blogging at the Web2fordev gateway, from which I...
- Perspectives on constraints of ICT in Africa Despite the exciting potentials about new technologies for development and,...
This blog explores worldwide social innovations and how people benefit from infor- mation and communication technologies. 
{ 1 trackback }
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the praise of Maneno, Christian. One clarification on the languages of Maneno in that we don’t have an Arabic translation, but we do have a Spanish translation, which is primarily for access of those living in Equatorial Guinea. In addition to the Bambara and Swahili translations, our African languages will also be including Fula and Lingala in the next week or two. I’m working on integrating these translations right now.
An update as to our bandwidth in that with adding in the connection speed selector, people can fine tune to their bandwidth needs. The less bandwidth you have, the more functions that setting will take out, getting the home page to the point of being 8kb with the strictest setting. Once fully implemented, the other pages will be similar. I think it’s tough to balance out bandwidth size with appeal and this is the best solution that pops in to my head as it gives people a choice (if they’re logged in to Maneno) as to how lean they wanna be.
It’s unfortunate about Twitter, because unless you’re using the mobile version, the standard web version is actually incredibly heavy, which is probably surprising to a great many people given that it is in theory such a simple thing.
-miquel
To admit, I haven’t been thinking of the bandwidth problem yet – spoiled German. This will change on the day of my arrival in Niger, I guess… Remembering your suggestion on Maneno will be a great service. Thank you Christian!
He, nice post. Would you know of any tools to measure the bandwidth per webpage?
Yes Joitske check out this website: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
It also shows the time for different connection types.
I haven’t tried this out yet but Posterous looks promising as a low-bandwidth blogging solution that can interface with email. I’ve been playing with the idea of using a tool like that to create a group blog with our field workers based in Africa.
Shannon, Posterous appears to be low bandwidth as it’s a sparse layout and one that I quite honestly like a good deal. Unfortunately, they use some massive Javascript libraries to pull it all together that makes even basic pages quite large and very much not low bandwidth. Maybe there are some settings to override some of this, but I don’t know as I’m not actively using it.
Obviously, I’m rather biased towards what we’re doing with http://www.maneno.org as we have multiple options to dial the download footprint of the site up or down depending on your restrictions.
-miquel