(hat tip - Bart Victor)

In a front page article for the Wall Street Journal, the author describes the the process and the problems (subscription required) of building out the mobile phone network in rural India. The promise: a template that can be applied to other regions.

India, with most of its people living in villages in the countryside, has become a laboratory for how to make networks work cheaply in areas where hot climates and unreliable electricity drive up costs. As companies figure it out here, their successful experiments are being exported to other developing regions including Africa and Southeast Asia.

Are there other technologies that could use this roll-out model? What kinds of issues could they run into?