🚀 go-pugleaf

Thus spake devil@diablery.10A.com (Gil Tene):

> I'd like to know what form of e-mail access is openly available
> in South Africa. By "openly available" I don't meen "free", but
> rather "available without any excesive use restrictions" (such
> as "academia only", etc.). Something like what UUNET runs in 
> the US.

The situation has now stabilised somewhat.  The local universities
have a network called, originally enough, Uninet, which runs TCP/IP
between universities and across a 9600 leased line to the US of A.
They import most newsgroups, and have all the mail facilities that
they need (when the link is up).

There is a local Usenet-type network (called SANet), which has a
dial-up link to the US (courtesy of Olivetti) for mail, and has
a news feed from the university network.  There are about 60 sites
in this network, all on dial-up links (see comp.mail.maps for a
recent copy of u.zaf.1).  

The local Fidonet crowd get a news and mail feed from the university
network.  There is also a link from Greennet in the UK, down Africa,
to Worknet in SA, which then links to SANet.

Domains to look out for:

	.za		South Africa
	.ac.za		SA Universities &c
	.co.za		SA Commercial
	.alt.za		SA misfits (NGOs, private use, etc)
	.uucp		look in u.zaf.1

In a pseudo-graphical form:


			    Fido zone 5
				  |
USA -----tcp/ip-------     Uninet-ZA (.ac.za)
				  |
			  dial-up gateway
				  |
USA ----dial-up-------         SA-Net (.co.za,.alt.za,.uucp)
				  |
			 uucp-fido gateway
				  |
UK --Greennet/Africa--   Worknet (.apc.org)
 
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 Paul Nash                                         paul@frcs.Alt.ZA
 Box 12475, Onderstepoort, 0110 South Africa         +27-12-5611879