Because it is has more value. It is more expensive, but the value you receive is greater. A single domain web hosting by Hostgator with UNLIMITED disk space and bandwidth cost $4.95/month. A multi domain hosting from Bluehost cost $7.95 / month. This multi domain hosting can host unlimitted domain, and have UNLIMITED disk space and bandwidth. You can see that Bluehost charge more but with greater value. So what will you do if you only need a hosting for one domain?

Ask your friend if they need a hosting. You can charge them $1/month or $12 a year. Very-very cheap. With 8 friends you didn’t have to pay your own hosting. They will pay it for you.

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From 7th through 14th January, 2010, Beyond Distance will hold its 5th Annual Learning Futures Festival. This year, for the first time, the festival will be completely and only online.

Is it good to have a conference in a completely online format? How can sitting in one’s office in front of a computer monitor, clicking, typing, discussing, watching and listening to something taking place many miles away be preferable to actually traveling to that distant city, booking in for the nights, sitting amongst rows and rows of participants all listening to a single speaker on the podium, standing in a queue for the finger food – to say nothing of the expense? The fact is that online conferences are beginning to look more attractive, especially in these days of economic challenge.

But saving money is not the only benefit. Participants report other benefits, such as: more in-depth, more detailed, and more inclusive discussions; participation from delegates further afield; time flexibility; and having a permanent record of proceedings. Online conferences tend to challenge the sage-on-the-stage model of presentation by offering every delegate more direct access to the speaker as well as to every other delegate – in real time and in his own time.

I had an interesting online conference experience this week. I assisted as my colleague Gabi Witthaus served as a keynote speaker for the National Association of Distance Education and Open Learning in South Africa (NADEOSA) annual conference. (See Gabi’s OTTER project blog post about this.) This conference, while not an online conference, was online for me and Gabi – the conference took place in Pretoria, but Gabi and I were in the Media Zoo at University of Leicester.

Gabi had sent a good-quality video file of her presentation to South African colleagues, using filemail, so as not to disappoint if a live presentation connection to South Africa did not work. It was a good thing Gabi decided on a belt-and-braces approach. The first difficulty was that filemail, though always rock-solid, proved problematic for South African colleagues; in the end they settled for a low-resolution version of the file. The second issue arose with the live question-and-answer session; we tried various conferencing software, but all proved unstable. We had hoped to at least connect via a phone landline, but there was no landline in the auditorium where the keynote was to take place. Finally we settled on Skype – with video in the Media Zoo so that Gabi could be seen and heard in Pretoria, but with sound only in the auditorium so that Gabi could hear, but not see, the delegates.

In the end, the keynote presentation, though not without its difficulties (Skype dropped the call several times but we quickly reconnected), was a great success. We wondered if the audience, simply watching a movie of a presentation, would feel engaged enough. The many in-depth and insightful questions revealed that they had engaged. We were indeed at a very lively and thought-provoking conference with an auditorium full of academics, even though it was only two of us in the Media Zoo with a laptop, thousands of miles away. The fact that we fruitfully participated with colleagues with much less access to technology than we have underlined the need to continue exploring online conferencing in higher education. Please watch this space for upcoming information on our own Beyond Distance Learning Futures Festival Online – and plan to join us!

Terese Bird

There is an issue in the donor world that really bugs me. It has bugged me since 2004, when I was sitting in a small NGO in Ukraine that had a poor internet connection, and I found myself really struggling to find grant information that could help these people-this was largely attributable to web design that, instead of making it easy to find information, actually made it harder.

This issue bugged me enough that I finally finally did something about it. I was in Anne Nelson’s New Media and Development Communication course at SIPA, and capitalized on the opportunity to research this issue, put together a lot of my own thinking and experiences to create a list of recommendations and “how-tos”, and publish “Web Design By Donor Organizations For Low Bandwidth” on our wiki detailing a wide range of projects/findings/conclusions on real world new media and development projects.

I am certainly not alone in this frustration. In fact, I was talking to a fellow media developer who had a similar story. “I remember waiting many many minutes in ethiopia for silly pages to load that were just too heavy and finallly giving up,” he said.

Of course, I know why this happens, why donors and development organizations that are at least one step removed from “the field” sometimes build websites that are treacherous to access in developing countries. One, they don’t really know anything about web design, and create a terrible site. Or, two, they just don’t take a consumer-driven approach, and think more about how they would like to site to work rather than consulting their target audience to maximize usability. Or, three, their target audience is other donors and/or “non-field” development organizations, and thus they have some standard of what is “professional” they must follow in order to come off as a respectable donor or “non-field” development organization.

I definitely get the concern of wanting to look professional with all of this stuff. For me, I personally think usability is moreimportant, which I wrote about in that wiki project. My basic argument is that donors should concern themselves more with whether or not their websites are usable than whether or not they have a look that is focused more on what has been traditionally considered professional. Traditionally, the sites that people create to appeal to donors create great difficulties for people in developing countries in low bandwidth situations (read: most of the developing world) to view their websites.

Personally, my approach is to try to create sites that make it possible for these people to view them. One, it will make it easier for them to find available grants (if you have them), and two these people will be able to benefit from the example of the projects of your organization. I try in all of my work to present the best example for all audiences who could benefit, even if one of them isn’t my target. So, if my target audience is donors, I would still want a site that maximizes recipient audiences’ ability to view and benefit from them. After all, they need all the help they can get.

In short, I am trying to say to donors, “I understand you want a certain look and feel to be impressed and take an organization seriously. But, your main purpose is to help the people who are the ultimate recipients of your aid. Here are areas where you might want to give in a little in order to create websites that will maximize the benefit of what you are trying to do in the world, and perhaps more importantly, minimize the barriers your site creates. There are already plenty of barriers in the way of information. My recommendation is not to be one more.”

Otherwise, in my experience, donors just end up creating a divide between organizations in big cities with internet connections good enough to be able to access donor information and perhaps enough money to spend on a great webpage, and organizations out in the smaller towns that are much closer to “the field” that have very limited resources, and don’t have the bandwidth to avoid spending all day trying to view a couple of websites they desperately need the assistance of.

Certainly, there are different audiences for different types of organizations in the development chain, and each has its own type of site it should build.

I’m just trying to be a force to help pull the pendulum back into smart web design that will prove the most helpful where help is needed the most.

Photo 1:  Courtesy of Research Reinvented.
Photo 2:  Courtesy of Kozuch.

CrazyFriendz is an online community that connects people with all their friends and allows them to make new friends. You can also share your photos & interests with you growing network of friends. CrazyFriendz also allows you to create and join online clubs to discuss/share your views on a wide variety of topics.

CrazyFriendz is an online community that connects people with all their friends and allows them to make new friends. You can also share your photos & interests with you growing network of friends. CrazyFriendz also allows you to create and join online clubs to discuss/share your views on a wide variety of topics.

Sometimes, work done in a small vertical market (niche market) can have a profound impact on individuals from a much larger market. This seems to be the case with product, services and projects my team has worked on since early 2005. Who would have thought the ubiquitous public switched telephone network (PSTN) would serve a vital role for Rural Telehealth and HomeCare in 2009?. It does and will continue to play a role for years to come.

Some would say that transmitting and receiving video communications via POTS is the lowest of low technology and in some ways I would agree. Given a choice between Broadband, ISDN, 3G or POTS to use for Rural Home Telehealth most would say “anything but POTS”. This is especially true when pushing video and audio through a standard phone line. But you know what? The US is a big country (I mainly work in the US) and when I use the term “Rural” I mean Rural, not the subjective state of mind definition but the objective quantitative measure.

• The US Census Bureau, the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) Economic Research Service, and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) have come together to help define rural areas. (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Anyway my point is; a lot of people live in Rural Areas, not just in the US but around the world. The United States went to great lengths to insure every resident could be served by the PSTN. The public switched telephone network is one of our countries greatest assets, one that is increasingly undervalued and overlooked. Yes, I am preaching a bit……

I, like most gave low bandwidth (bit-rate) video communications over POTS a limited life span within a very limited Home Telehealth market. Over the last 4+ years I have worked with low bandwidth (bit-rate) video in the home telehealth market and witnessed remarkable success and failure. Success using this technology is predictable but so is failure and most of the time it has nothing to do with the PSTN or technology used. It has everything to do with project or program management, goals and objectives and personal expectations. It is sad to say that I’ve seen programs fail simply because a person of influence, within the program, created self fulfilling prophecies (cant this, cant that, to much trouble, we are professionals that need the best not this low tech crap, 30 frames or nothing, zero tolerance for anything deemed unworthy of his or her professional stature etc.).

Finding resources (all) to improve the technology, identify, adjust and modify existing infrastructure have been difficult. My solution was the path of least resistance (3G, Broadband, point to mulitpoint etc.) essentially committing my low bandwidth (bit-rate) work via POTS to the dust bin. Turns out there are a lot of people in the Home Telehealth market that felt as I did and were willing to realistically look at the options available for rural areas.

Over the next few weeks I will be tweaking my business model to allow a continued focus on low bandwidth (bit-rate) video telecommunications via H.324 and the modified H.324 protocol for 3G. In response to requests, I will try to provide current posts on relevent information for the topic of Rural Telehealth Technology. —-

Thanks to Bill, Tim, Stacy and others for the encouragement.

This response is a follow-on to Jeff’s post which can be found below as well as some responses that were received to a cross post.  This is my take and hopefully Jeff (and others) will comment.  Thanks to Jeff for letting us know that once again we are still way behind in the solutions game.

What Jeff experienced is not new and is readily experienced by almost every aid worker that is deployed to the field today as well as those individuals we work with.  If you are in Nairobi or sequestered in a compound you are likely to reap the benefits of an over-sold but none the less fat pipe VSAT.  However, more often than not you are going to end up doing exactly what Jeff did in the Congo, what we did in Indo in 2007, and what our associates have done in every location around the world for the last 10-15 years – squeeze water from a rock.

This is not a new problem and yet it always manages to avoid a fix.  It is not so much an issue of how much bandwidth you have but rather how well you use that bandwidth.  These days many people believe that everyone needs enough bandwidth to be able to stream TV, watch endless YouTube videos, and download files in 2 seconds rather than 20.  Yet most of the world gets by just fine on a trickle of bandwidth, web mail and a chat client.  Given that fact (my fact) we should still focus on increasing bandwidth to emerging markets but also not ignore bandwidth conservation and the incredible impact it could have on accelerating the adoption of technology in the developing world.

Connectivity

Mobile networks will soon become the primary provider of Internet connectivity for most of the developing world.  Google’s investment in o3B (sort of) bears this out granted such a backhaul can also be used for WiFi/WiMAX, etc.  I still think that most people will be getting their mail on their phone or doing exactly what Jeff’s associate resorted to which was to plug his desktop into his phone and stick the antenna out the window.  Even if you do not have the connection you can still run a sneaker net just as they did.  And there is still good old dial-up.  Again, the connection is not the key issue here, the software is.

OS

My guess is that most people in emerging markets are running bootleg OS’s which, while functional, are total junk.  You can walk into any bootleg DVD store and while you are picking-up the latest movie that was poorly filmed by some kid with a camcorder you can also get a cracked version of just about any software out there.  The problem is aside from bootlegs being illegal in certain parts of the world it is also hazardous material.  Bootleg anti-virus packages often come pre-loaded with viruses as do most cracked OS offerings.  It is just not worth it and no it is not the only solution.  Personally, I think Ubuntu is the solution.

Ok, ok, I can already hear the moans but who the hell is going to buy a real OS?  No one.  Who really wants to use a junk cracked OS?  No one.  Who does more than check their web mail, chat with friends and some minor word processing and spreadsheets?  Almost no one.  Really, why not use a FREE and readily available OS that is almost devoid of viruses.  Right there you can solve most of the problems.  Most of Macedonia has adopted Ubuntu so why can’t the rest of the world?

Anti-virus

AVG FREE Personal Edition.  Enough said.  Don’t even waste your time on anything else.  This will take care of 90% of your problems.

Browser

I don’t care which browser you use as long as it does one thing: block adds.  Advertisements are the bane of the developing world.  Does someone in Nairobi really want to see a Flash animation ad or some gaudy banner ad when all they really want to do is check their mail?  No.  One of the best tools I think you can use is Adblock Plus which comes as a Firefox Add-On.  Therefore, use Firefox.  It is FREE and dramatically cuts back on a tremendous amount of bandwidth clogging imagery.

In the US, with our ridiculously cheap bandwidth (think oil until about 2008), we can afford to drool over insurance ads or truck ads but out there such a luxury is not an option.  Seriously, the mindset these days is that gobbling massive amounts of bandwidth is perfectly acceptable.  Does anyone realize how much it costs to power the backbone?

Web mail

Lastly, just go get a FREE Gmail account and stop struggling with all the rest of the services.  Use the Thunderbird client if you want to POP your mail but by stripping out the web junk you’ve already solved most of the issues.  However, if the line regularly drops out better to POP it.  Thunderbird integrates seamlessly with Gmail.  You can do a lot with Gmail that you cannot do with the other services.

Problem

How do you get the software to the beneficiaries?  Use the same delivery system that is already in place.  Rather than selling bootleg software why not provide the real thing?  Once they download one copy of FREE and available software they could either give away or sell a legit copy of something useful.  (I am not endorsing this option for every application as I am sure it violates a handful of EULA’s) .  But is it against the EULA to charge a ’service fee’ to cover the vendors cost of downloading and copying the software but not for the actual software?  If folks out there can get a computer they can get an OS and in that case they could have a perfectly stable and efficient system for close to nothing.  What ever the case I am sure that all the vendors mentioned above would love to get their product into the hands of new customers.

Conclusion

What we see here is not a technology problem, it is an problem with education and advertising.  There are plenty of newspapers and billboards that are read/seen on a daily basis throughout the developing world and if Ubuntu can buy billboards in Silicon Valley along US 101 they certainly can cover the cost in select African locations like Ghana, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa which is their own backyard.  (Perhaps they already have an ad campaign in Africa – I have no idea.)  I am really not sure that we are the best choice for teaching people in the developing world how to conserve resources but bandwidth is our baby and if we invest a little up front and show them how to more efficiently use what we’re pushing their uptake will be greater than if we let them suffer with our clutter.  Ultimately, the ads will flow and the market will develop but we’re just not there yet.  Better to have smart users than none at all.

My friend Jeff has rescued me from my flu induced apathy by sending an excellent reality check highlighting the limits of IT in the field.  Here it is in full:

Jon writes here often about how cutting edge apps might be adapted for use by aid workers. As a tech guy myself, I love to read and dream about this kind of thing. But as a field guy, I’m unfortunately here to today to bring the dreams crashing down to reality.

The thing is, the IT life I have observed in the field, near to the beneficiaries, is not all shiny and high bandwidth. And “near the beneficiaries” is what matters. Coordination meetings with Google Earth maps projected on the wall, integrating UNOSAT imagery and placemark databases showing wells and refugee camps is the dream. But we must never forget why we are there: to work with communities to make the temporary and lasting changes necessary to let them support themselves. So that’s why the IT landscape near to the beneficiaries matters to me more than the IT context in the capital or headquarters.

Here’s a beneficiary for you: The man I’m thinking about is the data manager for a Congolese health district. He’s lucky: he lives on the eastern border of the country, close enough that the strong Ugandan economy supports his own struggling one. He’s got 30 kbit/sec Internet implemented via a serial cable plugged into a desktop mobile phone with an antenna out the window pointing across the border at Uganda. He works in a district office, so there are several computers, one of which is on his desktop, all donated by various vertical programs (the “AIDS computer”, the “Malaria computer”, etc). The WHO has supported the DR Congo strongly over the last decade, so he’s had the chance to travel 8 hours by motorcycle to the regional capital to attend classes in Microsoft Excel. He has a Yahoo email account.

During a meningitis epidemic, it’s his job to enter all the paper forms arriving by bicycle and moto from around the region into a spreadsheet setup by the WHO. It’s hard for him to get his job done… which is how I came to know him. My boss sent me over to him to try to find out why he could never give us the data we needed on time in order to make good decisions about our meningitis intervention. He explained that he can only work when the generator is on. Then he explained that sending files with Yahoo mail is slow, and doesn’t always work. Then when we looked at his computer to see why, we found evidence of several viruses making it impossible for him to open any document with “virus” in the filename. (I’d already noticed the evidence: each time our USB key came back from his office, it had a file named h.vbs on it.)

Across town in the MSF compound (a rented hotel), I was working with my own constraints. We also were dependent on the generator, since there is no electrical grid in eastern DR Congo. We had three laptops for five people, approximately the same ratio as the health office (2 desktops, 4 people putting significant time into meningitis). But because we had laptops, we could work when the generator was off. We had internet via BGAN satellite at 128 kbit/sec. It is expensive, at USD 5 per megabyte, meaning that we had a filter on our mail preventing us from receiving attachments larger than 2 megs.

The attachment limit turned out to be another problem. On the off chance that the generator, the phone, and Yahoo mail worked, and he managed to send the week’s data out to us via e-mail, we couldn’t receive it, because it was too big. We solved that problem by getting in the Landcruiser and driving across town with a USB key. Which, if you’ll recall, is how I knew that I should go over and remove his viruses.

How do we remove viruses? It’s easy, right? Update your virus scanner and scan. But an update is 12 megs, or USD 60 on satellite, and completely impossible to download on a 30 kbit/sec link from Uganda. So no update. MSF solves this problem by sending virus update CDs to the field monthly. But the viruses you catch in Africa tend to be locally written (this one was from a technical university in Nairobi). If they ever end up in the virus databases at all, they arrive late. Certainly later than my most recent update CD from Geneva. I got lucky and found instructions online for how to edit the registry and remove the virus. But I’m a programmer… who would have fixed it without me?

Keeping computers working next to the beneficiaries gets a lot harder as you pile on the constraints, doesn’t it? But it’s probably worth it, because of the benefits they can bring.

Or is it?

In Myanmar, my girlfriend worked 6 days without a computer doing mobile clinics, then came back to base on Sunday for a rest and to enter stats into the MSF spreadsheets. By necessity, she finished her stats and weekly report in an hour of work Sunday afternoon, then got on with the real business of resting up for the next week of mobile clinics. She said it was liberating to not use a computer in the field… which might be a lesson for us as well.

Here’s some tech lessons I’ve learned in the field:

• Use POP, not webmail. Slow, unreliable, expensive connections are the enemy of web apps.
• Don’t expect to be able to use web apps, even the ones your headquarters says you should be using.
  
• Have lots of USB keys around to move documents
• Expect viruses and struggle on regardless, there seems to be no workable answer to this. (At one Congolese internet cafe, the operator scanned USB sticks before allowing us to use them. I gave him my USB stick clean, and I got a virus back from him. Great.)
  
• The simplest thing possible might work. Anything more complicated won’t.

The number one lesson: The work is worth doing, and to do it right you have to be out there, at the edge, in the mud, with the beneficiaries, in their communities. If the IT can’t keep up, leave it at home.

Lifehacker has a story about Opera’s new browser featuring a “Low Bandwidth Mode”.  This could come in mighty handy for those of you stuck in the bush.  When is the rest of the world going to figure out that most of the world fights the low bandwidth battle every day.  From the post:

A new beta of the Opera web browser is now available for download by willing testers and adds a “low bandwidth mode” email feature for when you’re on skinny pipes (or just trying to save a few bytes), along with enhanced browser data sync between remote computers, email client improvements, and a better RSS feed preview. Let’s take a look.

Read on…

Renaud Gaudin of Geekcorps-Mali has an excellent summary of ways to optimize your network when you are stuck with an over-priced and often over-sold VSAT connection.  These low bandwidth/high latency networks are the bane of the humanitarian aid industry and suck up millions of dollars every year that would normally be used for purchasing medicine, food, supplies, etc.  Renaud writes:

To use the Internet more effisciently and get the max of those tiny 200KB, we have used the following strategies:

1. Cache web pages on the client computer at the radio station.
2. Force the client computer to communicate only with a central server.
3. Have the server strip images and ads from web pages.
4. Have the server email news summaries to the client.
5. Transfer email between client and server just once per day.
6. Strip attachments from email messages.
7. Compress all communication between client and server.
8. Disable web access when the daily quota is exceeded.
9. Provide continuous feedback of daily network usage to help the user learn to efficiently use the Internet.

He goes on to link to include a link to a Low Bandwidth Networking technical document.  This is a fantastic document outlining the use of a Squid Proxy, Loband Filter, and even Ubuntu for running a lean and mean system when faced with major connectivity hurdles.

Defeating the scourge of the dirty, low bandwidth/high latency over-priced networks is the last great battle that has yet to be fought.  Humanitarian organizations dump more money into bad connections than they chose to think about.  All the philanthropic assets of the IT industry should be trained right now on solving this priority issue.

Chris Wilson and the folks over at Aptivate.org have been wrestling with this 400lb. gorilla for years now and they created Loband.org, wrote ‘How To Accelerate Your Internet’, and contributed to host of projects in an effort to defeat it.  I started my own NGO, Humanlink, also in an effort to develop a solution to pressing humanitarian telecommincations and technology problems.  We ran a successful mission in Indonesia last year where we rolled out Clark Connect Community Edition boxes at no cost to the organization we were assisting.  Mercy Corps has been using Clark Connect for years due to it’s web caching (and other) abilities.

Though we have celebrated the year 2007 as a year of Broadband here in India yet there are a million of internet users who are still connected to low bandwidth internet connection. There are a lot of reasons behind it, be it non availability of services to rural area or availability of only a limited connection in a specific area. There are a lot of internet services available who demands Broadband as a bare minimum requirement. The most interesting one of them is VOIP. Let me explain it in brief for those readers who don’t know what it is. VOIP stands for “voice over internet protocol” i.e. You can talk to any computer or communicater connected to internet. By further expansion and applying convergence we can talk to a user of landline telefone or cellphone.
Now let i expose my vision for these services. We all know that convergence is everywhere so why cannot we add some more convergence to this service. I hope everyone will be familiar with text to speech programs, these are programs which can read selected text on your computer screen. Suppose if we can develop an IM client with implementation of text to speech engine, we can mimic a real voice chat session even on a very low bandwidth, as much low as 15 kb/ps will be suffice. People may say that they are not satisfied with the accuracy of text to speech programs, the voice is totally inhumane. Now i have one more idea. Have you ever heard an IVRS session, of course you have heard, remember the last time when you have checked your cellphone’s prepaid balance, the female voice during an IVRS session was produced by adding/arranging prerecorded voice bits, using computer algorithm. We can steal this idea for our purpose, we can create a database of prerecorded voice of frequently used word or we can provide a facility to a user to pronounce a specific word and record it in his own way. Since all this process is offline it has nothing to do with internet bandwith.
Finally we have rendered a service through which we can do a voice chat even on a 15 kb/ps bandwidth, which is going to exchange only a few megabytes of data for an entire month.

Frak me, I am really hating dial-up. Hopefully, there is only one more week of this nonsense. Though in retrospect, I can remember the days when a 56 K modem was considered very fast. There’s just too much flash and java in the coding of pages these days. Meh.

Anyhow, I thought I’d share a little joke that constantly makes the rounds here in Vancouver. Recently, the owner of RIM (Research in Motion) made a bid to try to buy the Nashville Predators and move them up to the hockey-friendly climates of Hamilton, Ontario. However, the move was thwarted. Why?

Simple. If Hamilton had an NHL team, Toronto would want one too.

Bwahahahahahaha.

That is all.

I should have written about this long ago when I first heard about it but unfortunately this blog did not exist back then.  A fine Dutch gentleman in Indonesia mentioned that I might try it as he found it worked splendidly over low bandwidth networks and indeed it does.  What is it?  Shrink Pic is a simple little app that floats around in the back of your machine bothering no one and only steps up when you email a photo to a friend or send it via IM.  Shrink Pic automatically compresses the image before the transfer and what normally takes minutes now takes seconds.  You don’t see it, it doesn’t bother you and, best of all, it is free.

I love those folks who make our lives easier for free.  Download it here.

Forgotten networks are beautiful things. They are the unheralded heroes of the rest of the world. They are the pathways through the rice patties along which the rickshaws of the internet carry all the world’s staples. Unacknowledged by the networking gods and shunned by their flashier, sexier counterparts they move the data that none of see but that all of us consume. Made of millions of always failing crappy connections infested with viruses and junk they somehow seem to function in spite of it all. Nobody wants them but everyone needs them.

I just spent a very pleasant evening with Yahel Ben-David of airJaldi.com at the Intel Research Lab in Berkeley discussing these forgotten networks. We discussed how we could detoxify them and breathe new life into them as he is doing in Dharmsala and as we have done in Indonesia. Yahel is developing some amazing technologies out of simple packages that have been around for years but that have proven their worth time and again. We found value in these same packages when we rolled them out in Indonesia in the form of Clark Connect.

Forgotten networks are veins of pure gold that may once again draw prospectors. They are the overlooked and undervalued information highways that, with a little maintenance and TLC, can bridge the gap between the ‘haves’ and and ‘have nots’. To bridge the Digital Divide look no further. All that is needed now is that initial first step, that leap of faith.

Approved product for Department of Veterans Affairs CCHT (Care Coordination Home Telehealth) program.

Welcome to Telehealth Video Monitoring.  The goal of this Blog is to encourage discussion of Low Bandwidth Video via POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service).  Why?  Simply put, the US and most of the world have a proven method of communicating between each other, the ubiqutious PSTN (Public System Telephone Network).  Its there, we are attached, it is being used and modified for DSL and Video delivery to compete with Cable Companies so why cant we better use this delivery method to support Home Telehealth.

Providers, Patients and others considering Home Telehealth and Telemedicine need to be aware of the pro’s and con’s of both High & Low Bandwidth transmission delivery.  The variables involved in selecting product, service, transmission method, back end, front end etc. within Telemedicine (Telehealth is a subcategory) are many and one method of delivering service will never work for all.

The focus of this Blog is Telehealth (Low Bandwidth), specificaly low bandwidth video.  Yes, the good, bad and ugly of low bandwidth video.  What works, doesnt work, could work, ideas, studies, Provider Programs that work, along with those that have failed and why.  Productive dialog geared towards helping Providers maximize low bandwidth video programs is one of the goals.  Identifying trends and similar issues along with cooresponding solutions (if available) in a Knowledge Base format is another goal.

This is a work in progress and should be viewed as such.  Suggestions, comments and advice are necessary and may alter the structure or direction this Blog takes.

Thanks for your interest — mb

Welcome to Telehealth (low bandwidth). The goal of this Blog is to encourage and stimulate readers to discuss pro’s & con’s of low bandwidth Telehealth Video and find solutions for common problems when using POTS (Plane Old Telephone Service). Why? Simply put, we in the US and in most of the world have a proven method of communicating between each other, the ubiquitous PSTN (Public System Telephone Network). Its there, we are attached, it is being used and modified for DSL and Video Delivery to compete with Cable Companies so why cant we better use this delivery method to support Home Telehealth?

KMEA, a Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business (SDVOB) and HUBZone Concern was founded in 1996. Our core capabilities consist of Program & Project Management, Telecommunications (In & Out-Plant), Public Safety Infrastructure and Strategy & Change Consulting. KMEA worked exclusively in the commercial private sector until 2002 when we entered the Federal Government markets. We are continuing our vertical market focus in Telecommunications and Public Safety in the Federal Government markets.

KMEA has product, services, training and support for each vertical market focus. We are constantly involved in R&D, Concept Development and Quality Improvement Tasks within our markets and core capabilities.

About Me: Director of Tech Svs.
10+ years experience Telecom Infrastructure (RBOC, IXC & Consultant). Primary focus, Voice – Data Integration (IP Convergence), Video Conferencing, Streaming Video and Bandwidth Optimization. Currently involved with Bandwidth Optimization, Infrastructure build-outs for High Bandwidth Telemedicine use and Equipment R&D, Bandwidth Optmization, PSTN Best Use Policy, Low Bandwidth Video optimization for Home Telehealth use.