🚀 go-pugleaf

In <1991May23.211452.17937@netcom.COM> jms@netcom.COM (John Schonholtz) writes:

>The net reaches South Africa.  It doesn't seem to make it anywhere else
>on that continent, at least not yet.

Which "net" is that? ;-)

The zone 5 (Africa) Fidonet gateway is sitting here at Rhodes University
and we are dialling Botswana, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Ethiopia.  We also
have users from neighbouring countries (e.g. Namibia) that have guest
accounts on our Unix systems and dial in via X.25 (cheaper than direct
dial via modem).

There are a few problems with this - these Fidonet nodes are inherently
"single user" systems and just because there is an individual running a
system in say, Kenya, doesn't mean that the country is actually "connected".
It does show, however, that email access to less developed countries is
more than just possible.  South Africa has bootstrapped its way from a
Fidonet gateway up to uucp and (shortly) full TCP/IP connectivity over a
period of two years.

Another problem is internal infra-structure.  How badly do universities
in the same country need to talk to each other?  Our experience was that
local networking only took off after we got international email access.
Up until then, an "email culture" doesn't exist, and has no reason to
exist because it is easy enough to pick up the phone and talk to
somebody.  However you can sell international email as being "cheaper
than a fax", and once this is accepted, local networking (even within an
organisation) booms because the culture is acceptable.

Conversely, if you don't have internal networking, sites don't develop
the skills or experience required to handle international traffic.
In short, it is a complex and non-obvious set of causes and effects that
gets a developing country (as opposed to a single individual in that
country) "on the net".

Lastly, you can have all the will and skills and hardware in the world
in a given place, but if you can't get a reliable telephone connection
across town, let alone into a neighbouring country, you will land up
frustrated.  Other problems, such as reliable power, hardware
maintenance etc pale into insignificance compared to lack of comms
infrastructure.

In South(ern) Africa, there are many people at many sites (Fidonet, uucp
and TCP/IP) who are more than willing to provide connectivity and
technical assistance to sites in neighbouring countries.

--
     F.F.  Jacot Guillarmod - Computing  Centre - Rhodes  University
     Artillery Road - P.O Box 94 - Grahamstown - 6140 - South Africa
     Internet: ccfj@hippo.ru.ac.za    Phone: +27 [0]461 22023 xt 284
     uucp: ..!uunet!m2xenix!quagga!hippo!ccfj  Fax: +27 [0]461 25049