[LINK] UK to Get 2Mb/s Universal Broadband

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

> <http://www.culture.gov.uk/what_we_do/broadcasting/5631.aspx>. The 
>
> The headline objective is universal (UK) broadband at up to 2Mb/s. 

Agreed Tom, 2Mb/s isn't quick.. but still, the digital divide is growing

(Just btw, the person who emailed me off-list regarding the 'real' broad
band situation in suburban England in answer to my Link post re this, may 
wish to email all Link folk with your real-life UK Internet experiences?)

Bringing the Internet to Remote African Villages 

Chris Nicholson / The International Herald Tribune
and CHRIS NICHOLSON www.nytimes.com February 1, 2009 

ENTASOPIA, Kenya — The road from Nairobi winds 100 miles to this town 
deep in Masai country .. a dirt track climbing over broken hills and 
plunging back to desert flats. The going is slow.

The outpost, with about 4,000 inhabitants, is at the end of that road and 
beyond the reach of power lines. It has no bank, no post office, few cars 
and little infrastructure. 

Newspapers arrive in a bundle every three or four weeks. At night, most 
people light kerosene lamps and candles in their houses or fires in their 
huts and go to bed early, except for the farmers guarding crops against 
elephants and buffalo.

Entasopia is the last place on earth that a traveler would expect to find 
an Internet connection. 

Yet it was here, in November, that three young engineers from the 
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, with financial backing from Google, 
installed a small satellite dish powered by a solar panel, to hook up a 
handful of computers in the community center to the rest of the world.

Satellite connections (snip).. are fast and stable, which is why they are 
attracting interest from the likes of Google, as a way to provide 
Internet connections to the estimated 95 percent of Africans who, 
according to the telecommunications union, have no access. 

The dish at Entasopia was intended to operate for months with little 
maintenance under harsh conditions. 

This station, along with two others in villages almost as remote, is part 
of a larger push by Google into small, marginal communities, providing 
them with new tools to access information, work with distant colleagues, 
and communicate with friends and family.

Google paid for the final design of the stations and is covering the 
monthly fees for satellite bandwidth. The company has also invested in 
O3b, a start-up that hopes to deploy a constellation of satellites over 
Africa by the end of next year. <http://www.o3bnetworks.com/>

Bandwidth fees for stations like the one in Entasopia could cost as much 
as $700 a month, though slower ones cost less, said Wayan Vota, a senior 
director at Inveneo, a nonprofit that works to disseminate Internet 
technology throughout Africa and the developing world. As these 
connections are introduced more widely, which is O3b’s goal, the price 
could fall, Mr. Vota said.

When Internet connections arrive in small towns like Entasopia, they put 
new tools into the hands of people hungry to use them, and for some 
there, that has had wide repercussions..

Julius Kasifu, 40, is using the Internet to try to help others. His 
family runs a farm, but because his legs were crippled by polio as a 
child, he was limited in the farm work he could do.

In Masai society, he said, disabilities like his were seen as bad omens.

Traditionally, disabled newborns were abandoned, and their mothers were 
put through a ritual cleansing to banish the evil spirits that were said 
to have caused the disability, while the place where the birth took place 
was burned. Even now, such children are often kept hidden away in the 
family manyatta, a wattle-and-daub hut.

Mr. Kasifu is leading a campaign to raise awareness and to build a 
shelter, called Tuko, for such children. With the Internet connection, he 
has been able to upload a short video about their plight.

“The mothers come to me and say: ‘Have you got a place to take our 
children?’ ” he said. “It hurts, but what can I do? Out of that hurt came 
this project.”
--

Cheers,
Stephen

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