Deploy a cheap VoIP network using the Jabber (XMPP) Jingle protocol. This can be built in a standards compliant way on at least 2 extremely well known and well used Jabber servers (ejabberd and Openfire).

Set up an eJabberd instance to peer to major Jabber/XMPP providers to support PubSub and/or PubHub for SA locally. This would simply require server infrastructure (dependent on traffic of course), bandwidth and physical placement in a datacentre.

Using this type of technology, web developers could implement "push" updates to other web apps, users and other services. This means a general reduction in bandwidth usage overall as it scales as there will be way less polling for RSS feeds, updates etc.  read more »

At the moment there are very few locally hosted public Jabber / XMPP servers around. Using overseas servers to chat to other locals unnecessarily wastes international bandwidth resources that could be used better and it is also much slower in terms of latency as well as being less reliable obviously.

It's really simple to set one up on Ubuntu, for example, as there are packages for many of the popular Jabber daemons available but somebody will obviously have to provide some server space and good local bandwidth.  read more »