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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."
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.
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
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.