
Thread beginning with comment 522678
To view parent comment, click here.
RE[2]: seriously
by galvanash on Mon 18th Jun 2012 16:40 UTC in reply to "RE: seriously"
Member since:

Ubuntu frames itself as being for everyone, with a specific Africa angle.

They really think most people in Africa are going to have a broadband connection?

Two things.

One, Ubuntu does not and has never had a "specific Africa angle". Mark Shuttleworth is South African - that explains the name. There is nothing else to explain. The stated goal of Ubuntu is simply to make their software available free of charge on equal terms to everyone, and well that is it. If they were trying to solve Africa's problems I'm pretty damn sure they would be doing something completely different...

Second... You don't know what you are talking about. Less than 3% of the population of Africa have landline telephone, and only a fractional percentage of those with landlines even have dialup capability. The number WiMax/Cellular internet users in Africa far outweigh the number of dial up user (by at least a few orders of magnitude). WiMax/Cellular data use in Africa is growing dramatically, about 4X faster than the rest of the world in the last 10 years (although it is still relatively small). Dialup? Never even got off the ground there. Africa will likely never have more than maybe .25% dialup users, if that.

90% or so of ALL internet users in Africa are in South Africa, Morroco, or Egypt. About half of them are on some form of wireless. In the rest of Africa it is closer to 98% wireless, because they simply don't have the infrastructure for anything else - even dialup.

In short the about the last place on earth where this matters is Africa. It is a much bigger problem for the US, which still has a very sizable dialup userbase.

Reply Parent Score: 5