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Mauritius Aims To Be First Wireless Nation
hattan writes "This tropical island off the east coast of Africa is best-known for its white-sand beaches, its designer clothing outlets and its spicy curries.
But tiny Mauritius is about to stake a new claim to fame. By year's end, or soon afterward, it is expected to become the world's first nation with coast-to-coast wireless Internet." From the article: "An undersea broadband fiber-optic cable, completed three years ago, gives the island fast and reliable phone and Internet links with the rest of Africa and with Europe, India and Malaysia. Many of the country's 1.2 million people--a mix of French, Indian, Chinese and African descendants--are bilingual or trilingual, speaking French, English and either Chinese or Hindi. The country is democratic, peaceful and stable."
How in the hell can anyone be faster than the Vatican to reach this level? Seriously, that's a nation you could get wireless inside of an afternoon, but maybe wireless networking is a sin like sausage was at one point. I don't get it.
Yeah, because its their fault thats happening. Maybe they'll fly right off to Zimbabwe just like you are doing now and pick up a gun and fight.
Most of the larger towns and cities in Africa are quite developed. They're very similar to towns in places like Arizona and Texas. They have running water, they have power, they have sewage systems, they have phones. While they don't have the latest in fiber optic technology, they do have decent Internet subsystems. Wireless technology will allow them to forego the expenses of laying cable, thankfully. One you adapt to the local customs, many of the cities there are very nice places to live.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I'm sure its IT industry is limited by its size but not because it's "dirt poor" because it's not.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Remember, the Vatican is a very historic place. There is monumentery there that cannot be disturbed by the placing of wireless transponders.
Besides, such systems would have very little use in the Vatican. Canon law states that all documentation from the Vatican must be in written form, on paper, and stamped with the holy seal of whichever bishop, priest, archbishop, cardinal, Pope, etc., is responsible for the document. You can't apply a holy seal to an electronic document.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
The African continent is one of those areas that is perpetually in the dark, both literally and figuratively. It appears as a large black mass in the World At Night map, and it has been a long time since it was a source of mankind-advancing knowledge (at least since the Library of Alexander in Egypt was destroyed).
In addition, its history of being conquered and carved up by Western empires has left it nearly incapable of functioning as a cohesive continent of nationstates. Rather, it languishes in tribal warfare made all the worse by the relatively recent influx of Islam which has torn the northern countries of Chad and Sudan to shreds.
But separated from the mainland, Maritius is amazing in its ability to remain relatively free of the strife that plagues the rest of the Dark Continent. Catering to foreign tourists who want to get away from the normal tourist hotspots, Maritius has been much more stable and forwardly progressing than its neighbors. It is really no surprise that it would be the first African nation to attempt something as ambitious as this project.
That it is the first in the world is absolutely amazing.
Is bragging that their "Whole Country" is wireless?
There are cities that have that much wireless capacity just from their coffee shops! Add in the hotels, and the all-too-prevelant open APs, and you see that that's nothing to brag on.
HexaByte - he's a square and a half!
Ah, the knee jerk reactions start. let's check some facts BTW
Size of Mauritius : around 1,865 km
Population : about1.2 Million
in contrast, size of LA: 1200 square kilometers
what, you say it's easy to actually network a tiny country. noooo, let's put some spin on it.... oh, BTW, let's put the catch words competition, innovation blah blah. this should get modded insightful
I wanna live there! If that's their method of convincing people to move, it worked. Seriously though - just add 10 or 20 bucks to your taxes and you're good to go! Awesome!
What exactly is your point, my good man? Are you suggesting that it would be impossible to convert the entire United States to wireless communication within a day? Of course it would be! That goes without saying.
But by starting small, at the township and county level, then progress could have been made. But such progress was inhibited by the government, due to lobbying from the large telecoms.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
You're absolutely right.
In fact, let's drop everything we're doing right now and... and what? Take those warlords out of power? Forcibly? Killing how many? Are you suggesting we should go in there and somehow instill democracy? That has, after all, worked so well in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, North Korea, Haiti, Panama, Kosovo, Iran, and India. All of the unrest in the world is clearly proportional to the amount of time we spend on things not directly related to it, and if we actively try to stop it, it will recognize our efforts and just be nice and go away.
So let's just stop all development of technology, any progress at all, and focus all of our efforts singularly on making everybody happy and healthy. Never mind the fact that this hasn't happened yet in all of human history; if we just stop progressing and think really hard about it, I'm sure the silver bullet will fall right out of our stagnant asses.
Those Mauritian pigs. Progressing on their own rather than getting involved with every little problem in the entire world. How dare they, those rich snobs.
it's a hell of a lot cheaper to install wireless access points across an island than it is to lay wiring across it.
"...if people respected copyright more, like you guys do with the GPL so religiously, [the DMCA] wouldn't be necessary."
Excuse me? Excuse me, senor? May I speak to you please? I asked for a mai tai, and they brought me a pina colada, and I said no salt, NO salt on the margarita, but it had salt on it, big grains of salt, floating in the glass...
This tropical island ... is best-known for its white-sand beaches, its designer clothing outlets and its spicy curries.
I thought Mauritius was best-known as the former home of the Dodo. Hopefully their stab at nationwide wireless connectivity won't share a similar fate.
from TFA:
The main problem, he and others say, is that the government holds a substantial share in Mauritius Telecom, the island's only fixed-line telephone operator, as well as one of its Internet providers and the company that controls the submarine fiber-optic cable that provides all of the country's phone and Internet bandwidth.
Because the government makes so much money from the company and its cable, it has been reluctant to open the market to competitors that might reduce Telecom's profits, even though the country's National Telecommunications Policy, passed in 2004, calls for "positive discrimination" by regulators in favor of start-up companies facing off against established firms like Telecom.
if i'm not immortal, what's the point of living?
...te?
peaceful? wireless? tropical?
/.-ed an entire nation
Every geek in the workd is going to move there.
We just
That has, after all, worked so well in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, North Korea, Haiti, Panama, Kosovo, Iran, and India.
As a matter of fact, it has worked in India, and quite well too - since the day they have gotten independence from the British in 1947, at least.
In a country of 1.2 billion people, majority Hindus, they've a Muslim President, a Sikh Prime Minister and a Catholic Caucasian female ruling party president. In fact, it's worked better than it does for the US, where except for two Presidents, every other one has been a Caucasian Protestant male.
Not to mention that India has a free market economy which has been growing by leaps and bounds. And it's quite unsettling that you would compare India (which is quite a broad-minded secular democracy with a growing economy) with countries like Afghanistan, North Korea and Iran - you, sir, just proved that you're as ignorant an idiot as the parent poster you were abusing.
Bah.
If they invaded to kill, they'd slaughter a bunch of idiots. If they invaded "nicely", a couple of British soliders would most likely be killed. Either way, a potenial PR disaster.
Honestly, the UK just doesn't give a shit about the island- not enough to drop a bomb on the place and blow it to smithereens, or anything else. They could have cut the island off long ago and starved everyone out, but even that wasn't worth it.
Please help metamoderate.
Erm, India's democracy is democratic all right, but that's about it. The central government is notorious for fucking up everything it touches, and corruption is rife throughout state and local governments. About the only thing this particular democracy has gotten right in the past two decades is to open the economy to the outside world, which, as you say, has contributed to growth. But even in terms of economic growth India's been beaten by East Asia's tigers, particularly China, a party dictatorship. So unless you value diversity for diversity's sake, I don't see how you can say that India's government works better than the U.S.--and that's hardly a glowing appraisal to begin with.
That has, after all, worked so well in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, North Korea, Haiti, Panama, Kosovo, Iran, and India.
Sir, I don't know what you smoke, but I think it's safe to say that you've smoked it all. When was the US ever involved in the administration of India?
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
"I wish I could move there, but I doubt there's much work for a software developer in a country nobody's heard of until today."
I think the bigger news is the undiscovered island of 1.2 million people.
Question everything.
Hi, I live in Mauritius, the home of the extinct dodo.
. mu
Country's bandwidth to the Internet: 128 Mbps
Here is some information about Internet connectivity with the biggest ISP, Telecom Plus.
266 US$/month - Business ADSL 1024/128
147 US$/month - Business ADSL 512/128
78 US$/month - Business ADSL 128/64
40 US$/month - Residential ADSL 128/64
60 US$/month - Residential ADSL 512/128
266 US$/month - Residential ADSL 1024/128
Taken from
http://www.telecomplus.net/adsl_tariffs.htm
1 US$ ~Rs 28
VAT is at 15 %
Oh, forget about getting dedicated >1mbps connections, they cost over 2,400 US$/month last time I checked.
Also, Mauritius claims to home the most intelligent building in the world, the Ebene Cybertower.
See, this is a great place to live, all the peace and quiet is here but if you want to move here to enjoy cheap, fast and reliable internet connectivity, its the wrong place to be.
Information:
www.mauritiustelecom.com
www.gov
alt.mauritius
Have a nice day.
A way better indicator is (as another poster mentioned) is the Human Development Index. Per-capita GDP doesn't take into account things like typical standard of living, wealth inequity, etc.
Another good indicator is the Quality of Life Index.
If you want a simple, raw economic number, MEDIAN income rather than mean income is one of the better indicators of the wealth of a nation's people. Slightly better is median income scaled to purchasing power. Unfortunately I don't have tables for these. =(
I am Mauritian, living and working in Mauritius right now.
:-) like Dubai and Singapore in order to attract more and more tourists.
:-)
Mauritius is a small (about 1400 km2) tropical island not very far from Madagascar. Mauritius became independent in 1968, is a republic since 1991 and is, politically, stable with regular democratic elections every 5 years.
For the last 20 years, the economy was based on sugar cane, tourism and the manufacturing sector (mostly textile). Now, with the ongoing globalisation, Mauritius has to find new avenues for development as we aren't competitive enough in those fields...
The Government and the private sector have identified some new avenues, IT services and financial services, in addition to the further development of the existing tourism sector.
As for IT, Government is concentrating on building new schools and giving incentives to the University of Mauritius (where I work as lecturer in Computer Science) to produce a more IT-litterate workforce (whatever that may mean). Mauritius has obtained a $100 million line of credit from India to build what is known here as CyberTowers and CyberCities.
Of course, this migration towards a service-oriented economy will take some years. The Governement has already announced that the whole country will have to become a duty-free country (yeah
As everyone know, by 2008, owing to the World Trade Organisation, all countries including Mauritius will have to compete on the same level (there will be no more prefential agreements between countries nor any guaranteed quotas etc.)
Small countries like mine need to move quickly or else we will perish.
Wish us luck