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Internet Connectivity Options in Mozambique?
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."
There seems to be two problems here:
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.
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes
Hi there,
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