The Role of Telecenters in Rural ICT Development Part 4 Three main types of factors called enablers, inhibitors and

hygine factors dircetly affect the quality of service delivery in rural ICT projects (Sewchurran & Brown, 2011). The enablers are a must for successful delivery while the inhibitors would negatively affect the quality of service if present. The third set of factors, namely the hygine factors plays a special role in service delivery. Hygine factors may not play a postive role if present, but will negatively impact the services if absent. The factors that improve the quality of service delivery include identified service uptime and availability along with presence of a service level agreement (SLA). From a technical point of view, in order to achieve a ceratin level of service quality with predictable uptime and availabilty it is necessary to have sufficient computing, human and other resources to meet the customer requirements. If disaster management and mitigation is also taken into account, it is necessary to duplicate the entire system in another location. All these would add to the cost of service delivery. The best way to meet all these requirement is to collaborate with other service provider and have a common shared data center where the applications of multple service providers are hosted. From the above discussion, it can be seen that the telecenter implementations all over the world suffer from several issues. The main issues, as depicted in Figure 1, that affect the sustainability of telecenters can be summarized as lack of finacial resources for capital and operational expenditure, lack of skilled human resources for managing the telecnters, and lack of good internet connection.

Figure 1: Factors affecting sustainability of telecnters Hence the sustainability of telecenters can be improved by properly addressing the issues identified above. In order to address the lack of financing, we propose to reduce the cost by collocating services and use low cost equipment where possible. The lack of qualified staff can also be addressed by colocating the services and letting only the minimum routine services to be carried out by the telecenter staff. The telecenter staff can be easily trained on the routine services. The internet connection may not be an issue anymore as the high speed broadband connections at reasonable cost are becoming very common with the introduction fourth generation (4G) services all over the world.

Figure 2. Capacity-utlization curve (AWS, 2012) tical instability (Ogbomo & Ogbomo, 2008).