The Internet has been widely used by both students and faculty as a platform for learning and teaching. Kenyan universities are starting to provide e-learning resources for their on- and off-campus students. This is due to the large number of non-residential and working students enrolled in Kenyan universities. For example, over 50% of the 200,000 students enrolled in Kenyan universities are non-residential and require off-campus access to learning resources [1 – E-readiness survey data 2008].

Although there are many ways to access the on-line learning resources, for example, from the offices and cyber café’s, anecdotal evidence suggest that most students and faculty are using Mobile Internet services. This is likely to increase due to the fact that 99% of the university students have access to a mobile phone, and most have sophisticated mobile phones with data capabilities.

This paper presents advance results of some experiments conducted by KENET to assess the performance of Mobile Internet services (e.g. GPRS or 3G) offered by different mobile operators in Kenya when used to access local university on- line resources. In addition, the experiments included testing the performance of other wireless-based services, for example butterfly service offered by KDN.

This is not a comprehensive performance analysis of the different options but only presents initial tests being conducted. Read More