The issue of bandwidth has to do with electronic publishing, not open access. Open access is necessarily affected by bandwidth because open access relies on the non-rivalrous nature of bits to exist. Any electronic publication, toll-gated or not, will suffer from the same problem. However, anyone familiar with Third World conditions will not entrust diffusion of materials to paper and local post offices either.

Bandwidth is indeed an issue, but it is a general one and this is why it has to be solved in general for the Third World. There, the issues are related to the commercial strategies of major carriers and these are sometimes tied with the geo-strategies of major industrialized nations.

But, I repeat, the bandwidth issue is not specific to open access. As all of scientific publishing is being digitized and made accessible through the net, the same problem will occur, be it Elsevier, Springer or Wiley.

Finally, Open Access repositories would have an interesting project in transforming their files into formats that would be frendllier to countries or groups with limited bandwidth.