On 16/05/2021 18:51, Amali De Silva - Mitchell wrote: Asterisk and FreePBX are but two open source telephony projects that can handle bringing good numbers of simultaneous calls to the same land line number routed to multiple end points and bridging them together in a conference call. Regards, Adam.

Amali De Silva - Mitchell <gphlilanthi(a)gmail.com> writes: email on WSIS 2021 Forum session 3 bridging digital divide) to connect with whatever available tech with speed economies dependent on ICTs. there is technology fix to take this to more callers say 10 callers connecting. The bandwidth to enable zoom education areas. Also dial up internet is still an important option and content should be made avaliable for these technologies. purposes ... Connecting with real-time video can requires as little as 300 kilobits each (per) second (300 kbps or 300 kb/s or 0.3 Mb/s). Real-time audio requires less (as low as 14 kilobits each second). Text (web pages or email) and any non-realtime telecommunication (downloads) require whatever much as you have. It just takes longer if you have less speed. I remember we could have 600 MB files downloaded in a week with fax-modems. The phone call would be very costly because the payment was by the minute. Having that communication would cost about the minimum wage each month. But it was possible to get the information through. Current compression rates for audio and video make the information not very heavy. The current technical problem with communications is usually because it has to go to another country, even when the communication is local. More important are the privacy and freedom issues. Freedom software solutions like Mumble are very high quality for audio. Nevertheless, the most important is not the quality, but the freedom. We can make better free software technology if people want to be free. But we cannot be free with any software. The desire of freedom is basic, even if it costs more money or effort. But most people do not want to be free. Most want to be comfortable or look good, regardless of the freedom they have. Those are the real problems today.

quiliro(a)riseup.net writes: This would mean that if they have 500 Mb/s connection, it would be more than enough for a celular-phone-sized video conference. Which are your use-cases? Are there people with landlines who do not have and want internet connections? What are the telephone rates? Which is the minimum wage? If you can provide the above data, I can make a quick analysis of the viability. Other solutions are setting up community copper-cable or fiber-optic networks. These are very reliable and can be another solution. Each community can connect with another and by that way everyone is connected. This network can even be connected to the main global network if you want global connectivity for all. Amali: Just imagine a giant network of water carrying ducts. It might be something useful, if it helps uncover the possibilities.