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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."
http://www.ictp.trieste.it/~radionet/papers/
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.
Sounds to me like they're trying to retrieve email directly from a POP server or something; the aid worker who set that up should be fed to pack of wildebeests or tigers.
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.