ABSTRACT
If the Internet could be widely and rapidly dispersed across rural areas of developing countries purely on the basis of radios and telephones (described in the two previous chapters), there would be no need to seek out alternative mechanisms that are not based on these traditional modes of communication. In this chapter, however, we suggest that even in the medium run (defined as, say, the next decade), radios and telephones cannot realistically be expected to shoulder more than a relatively small part of the overall connectivity burden and consequently that other methods need to be sought. The following chapter deals, accordingly, with a variety of such alternatives that have in common the use of intermediaries to access the Internet on behalf of the intended beneficiaries and the absence of radios and telephones in the process of intermediation. What we are ultimately concerned to show in Part III is that widespread access to the Internet in rural areas requires as many models as possible, since circumstances vary so sharply between different parts of the Third World, and since the overall size of the problem is so pronounced.
