Wireless communication for rural areas

Laying out telephone cables or fibre to the villages, or erecting cellphone towers in remote areas is not commercially feasible. Over the last couple of years, the wireless community has been working on wireless meshes where the communications towers will talk to eachother over wireless, and there will be no need to connect them through fibre or copper inbetween. First Mile First Inch is running a project in Mpumalanga, South Africa, where they are using antennas carved out of tin-cans (called cantennas) to enable VoIP communication on WiFi meshes. Project Akshaya in India connected Malappuram village through a mesh network based on a proprietary technology from Airspan called WipLL. The Tier research group at UC Berkeley is working on the design of cheap communication towers to be deployed in areas where there are no powerline available. MeshDynamics is another company that works on the design of WiFi meshes, and claim that their systems will also be compatible with WiMax, whenever it comes out. Intel especially sees a bright future in WiMax for providing Internet access to rural areas and to plug the broadband gap. Once Internet services are available wirelessly, VoIP phones can easily be used for voice communication on the same infrastructure as well. Are WiMax meshes the solution to a cheap communication infrastructure instead? The links are as follows:

First Mile First Inch
Project Akshaya
Tier research group
MeshDynamics
WiMax for rural areas