There are many bridging-the-digital-divide initiatives implemented by various government agencies and non-governmental organisations throughout the world. Numerous studies have been conducted to identify the critical success factors in providing remote and rural communities equitable access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Malaysia has its fair share of successes and failures in such initiatives. One such initiative, the eBario Project, which provided ICTs to the rural and remote community in Bario, Borneo Malaysia, has been in operation over the last decade. The project was undertaken by the

In this study, we propose a new Amplify-and-Forward (AF) amplification factor to improve the error performances of the current AF schemes and thus enhance the total capacity at the destination terminal. The proposed scheme has two degrees of freedom, meaning that it contains two variable parameters that can simultaneously vary the amplification factor instead of one as in traditional variable-gain or semi-blind relaying. The numerical results show that the proposed AF scheme outperforms some current ones with which it is compared in terms of average capacity and probability of outage and thus brings AF relaying performances closer to that of Decode-and Forward (DF) strategy which hitherto outperforms it. The results also show that by increasing or decreasing the power share of the relay, the optimal location of the relay is not only moved closer to or farther away from the destination, the total average capacity at that location is also correspondingly increased or decreased.

Community Informatics (CI) is the application of ICT to overcome the “digital divide” both within and among communities (Gurstien, 2000). Taylor (2004) further asserts that CI is a connection between theory and practice in community networks. In this case, CI refers to the use of ICT for community practice, which Glen (1993) elaborates as encompassing concepts of community development, community service delivery and community action. With the emergence of CI, it is possible for remote communities to enjoy the benefits of ICT for economic and social development. For example, in India, the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation established six Village Information Shops, which enabled rural families to access and exchange a basket of information using ICT (Balaji & Harris, 2000). In Costa Rica, there is a project involving the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to implement “digital town centers” in remote villages (Harris, 1999).

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