Foundation Projects
E-mail system for telecentres and schools
The University of Moratuwa
Although technologies such as ADSL and 3G have brought broadband within the reach of ordinary people, many schools, telecenters and other small organizations still use kilobit-speed links. These connections are often priced based on data volume. This causes users of these sites two major problems:
- Severe congestion on the link to the Internet resulting in poor performance; and
- High cost due to volume of data transferred.
Email is still the most important application on the Internet. Many users use email daily, more often than other applications, and spend a considerable amount of time reading email each day. Any delays encountered when accessing email will multiply, and may add up to a significant amount of time. For example, if a total delay of 60 seconds is encountered for each email message, and a user reads 20 messages a day, this adds up to over 8 hours of wasted time each month.
The objectives of this project are:
- To provide users responsive access to email
- To minimize the amount of email data transferred across the link from the Internet to the user's site.
It also allows users access to email even if the link is temporarily down. In addition, the system is being localized into our national languages, Sinhala and Tamil, in a separate project.
