Internet Connectivity Options in Mozambique? 16
watanabe asks: "I'm going to help a relief organization in Mozambique this autumn, and have been talking to them about how to get their Internet services up and running better than they are now. They have 1200 physical sites, most of which are deep in the bush, and two cellular modems which connect to the national ISP. A major problem they have is sending e-mails to interested supporters; frequently their ISP drops large numbers of the e-mails, and doesn't tell them about it. Do you all know of any high speed options / LEO satellite / commercial companies that support businesses in Africa? I've been puzzling through how to get them better services, but I'm sure the collective wisdom of the Slashdot community is greater than what I can turn up on my own."
"For an example of what you can currently get in Mozambique:
There are approximately four ISPs in a country that is approximately twice the size of California. Together, they have a total of 256 kilobits to South Africa. One University has a 64k link to somewhere in Portugal. This is for the whole country, and summed across all ISPs. Clearly dialing in to these guys is not going to be the way to go."
Richochet, Ham, Fidonet, UUCP, short haul modems (Score:5, Informative)
Or do 4Mbps over line-of-sight spread spectrum with YAGI antennas... AirLAN or whatever it's called. That's only up to 2 miles though.
Also consider packet amateur radio. At one time there were some good PC applications to store and forward email along hops.
Another less obvious choice might be FidoNet, which has an Internet mail gateway. (If you're on a FidoNet node your address is something like (phutureboy@z5.n109.e43@fidonet.org). It uses dialup to pass emails through multiple nodes in a hub and spoke network, can be configured to exchange mail late at night when the rates are low, will run on a 386 with DOS and is *very* resilient in situations where the phone service is shitty. Or you could use UUCP to exchange mail in much the same manner...
Finally, for wired runs up to 16 miles at 1.2 -19.2 Kbps, consider using PPP over short-haul modems. They are super-cheap - like $25 each, and use 1- or 2-pair copper wire (like speaker wire). IIRC, these can also be used on LAD phone circuits in the U.S. I forget the name of the brand I used once, but this [google.com] should turn up some for you...
I suspect you're in for a struggle trying to get decent connectivity to the rest of the world right off the bat. Keep in mind that there are also huge benefits to connecting people in Africa with each other. You may be better off to focus on regional networks, and once those are in place you'll have more users to band together and help get a decent outbound connection in place.
Anyway, good luck, and drop a note once you've got them wired and let us know how it went.
Here's a few idea... (Score:3, Insightful)
1. How to merge the 1200 independant sites. I will assume that there is no phone system at these locations, otherwise I would suggest creating a central office and have the sites dialup to the office, and use normal means (UUCP, PPP, etc) to talk to the Internet. My suggestion for this is to create a radio network. There are many program to transmit packets over the radio, I used to use several of the HAM variety. The important thing to note is that not being in the US, you are not restricted to HAM frequencies or Wattage (distance) restrictions. You may find some inexpensive equipment to blast the packet back to a central office for transfer to the internet. Note, this does require a lot of power
One other idea I had, there are SAT-cell phones not based on Iridium I've seen around. It may be cheaper just to buy one for each office and use that.
2. How to get the central office to talk to the internet. Well, this is a little more tricky. Of course you can always place your central office near the national ISP, but it doesn't sound like they have the bandwidth. Other options include place the central office near the border of the most technologically advanced country and Broadband (ala Sprint-type) the data to them. Try and buy some time on a Iridium-like system for transfer of data (good for mail, bad for web). As a last option, It may be somewhat economical to lay a cable from your central office into the next country. Remeber you probably don't have any of the bureaucratic BS there is in the US, and you probably have cheap labor.
In any case, you need money. I suggest going to the peace corps, or save the children, or the like and ask for funding under the premise of providing internet for the children around these base stations (hey, "It's for the children" seems to work real well). There's always people willing to give money for something. Also, may want to approach Cisco, Intel, etc. Remeber that in these kinds of countries a "small" donation of $500,000 US goes a LONG way.
Re:Here's a few idea... (Score:1)
external mail provider (Score:2)
Packet Ham Radio Probably, More Questions ... (Score:1)
Getting widespread computing resources and connectivity into remote regions of the world can be a tall order. You have very difficult economic, cultural, and technological hurdles to overcome - expect this to be a major project. Its not clear to me what kind of solution you need ... some key questions to consider:
There are a wide variety of potential solutions, and a lot of the choices are going to depend on the answers to these questions. Its quite possible to get satellite links with high bandwidth and independent providers [panamsat.com] to the remote sites, but that costs very big bucks. Even satellite telephones [globalstar.com] are prohibitively expensive outside of mineral exploration and a few other uses. If all you need is basic email interoperability then a ham packet radio network [dxzone.com] would seem to make more sense.
I suspect your best bet is to figure out the general class of solution you might be looking for (very likely ham radio based, as there is already some infrastructure in africa for that and expertise among the relief organizations) and try to work with vendors, other experts, and local contacts with that solution in mind.
I would think as a relief organization you could get uplink cooperation from governmental/military providers, but you don't mention the organization so perhaps local cooperation is not forthcoming. The ISP email problem is probably best solved by using them as an IP provider only and setting up your own email server (get a cheap donated box and use it for general management as well as your own smtp server).
Of course a google search [google.com] brings up some interesting info, which I hope you've already worked through.
Regards, RJS
Re:Packet Ham Radio Probably, More Questions ... (Score:1)
Wireless Networking in Africa (Score:4, Interesting)
The experiences of the members of an Italian project in establishing wireless networking using Linux in Africa. This article appeared in Linux Journal #56 Dec 1998 issue.
E-mail over HF radio (Score:1)
You have a remote place without telephone and you want to connect via Internet e-mail. You want to use HF e-mail. You will need a radio transceiver, antenna, modem, as well as a computer, cables and software. You will also need agreed frequencies, probably some kind of license to operate radio equipment and compatible HF modems at each end.
Don't work alone (Score:2)
I've heard of other groups wanting to solve the same problem. Nuns in working in one village would like email to the pope, while some protistant group would like email to their leader. Various non-religion orginizations (including buisnesses) could use some access. They are all in the same boat as you.
Use that to your advantage. Most of the plans say put in short haul modems or radios (don't be afraid to combine them) from point to point, and use store and forward email. Don't be afraid to have some other group run a repeater for you. (make sure they can do it of course)
Telephones in Mozambique (Score:1)
How many ISP's are there in South Africa. Anyone know any philanthropic millionares in SA. Money without local knowledge will probably be wasted. Are there any mountains?
How do you create an infrastructure, is a chicken and egg question.
Try and stay in touch, I'm fairly sure most Slashdotters would like to know how you got on.
Peter.
Re:Telephones in Mozambique (Score:2)
Running telephone wires across national boundaries, and thus avoiding paying outrageous fees to the dictators telephone monopoly is a great way to get shot.
There isn't too many philanthropic millionaires in SA anymore either. Those who could left, and those who remain spend all their money on machine-gun toting security people to keep bands of criminals from gang-raping their wives and daughters. (Was featured on 60 minutes a month ago)
My old ISP in Mozambique (Score:2, Insightful)
I was one of the starters of the best ISP in Mozambique called Virtual Connection http://www.virconn.com . it's true that the ISP oficially runs on one 128Kbits line that we lease from the government, but if you look out in our backyard youll se our sattelite link bringing down 2Mbits, making us the fastest provider in Moz, we are currently working on getting sattelite links put up all over the country. Please drop me an email ad we might be able to figure something out.
my email is pccenter@virconn.com
Re:My old ISP in Mozambique (Score:1)
Your webdesigner's arent that good thou.. All the links in the top of the browser are fucked up.. http://www.seachvirconn/* =)
UUCP, silly. And maybe packet radio. (Score:3, Interesting)
They should be using UUCP to send and receive mail via a series of relays that pass mail along one step at a time through machines that dial up in the chain periodically, fetch whatever they can before getting cut off, and get (or send) the rest next time. This is what UUCP was designed to do back in the days when a whole lot of email was transported via multiple hops of unreliable dialup. It also gets people out of the business of using the expensive, unreliable dialup connection to sit around trying to read and compose mail--activities that should be done fully offline. The only machine(s) that should be connecting to an ISP are the ones that can reach it easily, i.e. in the city where the dialup line is located. The rest of your locations should be connected by dialing into a designated parent at off-peak-times, and retrieve messages for any machines downstream from them.
When a message reaches its destination machine, it can then be read, replied to, whatever, and the multi-hop journey back begins. The SMTP servers at each hop should be configured to reject or truncate large messages, since the whole system can get bogged down by one big file attachment that can never make it over an unreliable dialup connection.
I'm also a bit confused by the reliance on (cellular?) phone modems. Surely the region would be better and more cheaply served by amateur radio. It probably is already, in fact, and your organization just may not be in contact with any hams. Amateur radio has been used for low-speed data transmissions over very long distances for decades, and for wireless UUCP in remote areas for many years. Data transmission speeds might be slow, but it's reliable, it's dirt cheap (25-year-old shortwave-band transceivers and 10-year-old packet modems should be easy finds if you can't get them donated), and as long as you can supply some electricity and keep the equipment in good shape, you can run it around the clock.
Depending on the distances and terrain, the weather, the presence of jamming activity in the area and your ambition level, you could eventually branch out from UUCP and experiment with realtime BBSes via radio. Unless I'm mistaken, quite a few branches of Fidonet were available via packet in Fido's heyday.
I'd look at HOWTOs and docs for UUCP (which isn't just for Unix; you can run UUCP nodes on pretty much any OS including DOS) and at the Linux HAM-HOWTO for some starting points.
I am not a subject matter expert (Score:1)
Think packet radio for the remote sites to connect to the main site (the one with the best tel connections, and the mail is dumped to the remote sites as needed. Ban attachments and everything except plain text (no html/rtf formatted email) and you're 1/2 way to a solution.