Re: Networking in Africa...

[Jared Mauch <jared () puck Nether net>]

On Mon, Dec 02, 2002 at 10:24:11AM -0800, Joel Jaeggli wrote:
> On Mon, 2 Dec 2002 alex () yuriev com wrote:
>
> > > Hello,
> > >
> > > A friend of mine is working on one of the committees for next years 
> > > Supercomputing conference and noticed that, in the past, they'd had
> > > participants from most continents but none from Africa.  Does anyone
> > > know of a good organization/group/etc which we could spam with our 
> > > conference notice and request for participation?
> >
> > Would that friend be so kind as to name more than a handful places in Africa
> > with IP connectivity (multinational companies do not count).
>
> Most major cities in most countries have at a minimum ip dialup services, 
> in major metropolitan centers there are now large numbers of wireless 
> isps as well...

        One thing to keep in mind is that people that reside in Africa
are large/huge prepaid GSM users.  Take that and apply it to mobile
data services over cell phones (3G and the likes) and I think you
lend yourselves to interesting things.

        Doing bluetooth or IR to your desktop/laptop from your phone
to get 128k+ speeds where there is no wired infrastructure but
cellular will do interesting things to transform internet usage
in these places and others that have skipped the wired telephony
phase of "development".

        Take that in conjunction with the talks at nanog about ipv6,
pigs and rockets strapped on and you will start to see some of the
most interesting developments yet in the internet.

        - Jared

--
Jared Mauch  | pgp key available via finger from jared () puck nether net
clue++;      | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/  My statements are only mine.