Building a National Network through peered community area networks: realising ICTs within developing countries

The purpose of the South African broadband policy, SA Connect, is to provide a long-term approach that will begin to develop broadband access in SA with immediate effect. The policy aims to achieve this by implementing a broadband model that incorporates private and public sectors, increasing monetary investments towards ICT, reducing the number of impediments in the broadband policy, removing bottlenecks that inhibit broadband expansion and identifying successful methods and applications that will enhance broadband access. The current approach has been through a centralized deployment and ownership approach, which is largely delayed. In this paper we propose an alternative, decentralized approach to deployment and ownership, in order to incrementally and in parallel build a national telecommunications network through the interconnection of community area networks.