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Internet Connectivity Options in Mozambique?

Posted by Cliff on from the where-dial-tones-are-not-necessarily-guaranteed dept.

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."

1 of 16 comments (clear)

  1. Richochet, Ham, Fidonet, UUCP, short haul modems by phutureboy · · Score: 5, Informative

    Since Ricochet just went down the tubes, hop on eBay and see if you can buy up a bunch of wireless modems from the former users, then see if you can talk former engineers into lending a little technical guidance.

    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 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.