Interwebs in Africa

A friend recently wrote to me asking about internet access here in Uganda, specifically in more rural areas. I thought that it might be something that others are interested in so here is my response to him:

Our business is running on the fact that the national electricity provider only has 300,000 customers in a country of 30+ million people. At least 90% of the population is living off the grid so this pretty much makes internet impossible for now since something has to power the computers. So far there isn't a great option for running them on solar but we're working on it.

In the towns that are connected to the grid there are usually internet cafes that I imagine use dial-up so slow you wouldn't even recognize it as the internet ;) Also some of my friends in Kampala have little modems for their laptops, put out by cell phone service providers, about the size of business cards, that are supposed to connect them to the internet where ever there is cell coverage for that particular company. There is a satellite company here but I'm not sure exactly how it works. In any case, internet is quite expensive, that little modem is about $150 for the modem itself then about $65/month.

The big news for geeks here is that the "cable" is going to "hit the continent" any day now. Meaning that fiber-optic cables are being extended from somewhere in the middle-east to the Kenyan coast. This is supposed to speed things up a lot and decrease the price maybe but no one seems to know exactly what will happen when it lands - the feeling is akin to that leading up to Y2K, except that it can really only get better.

My friend Jon has a very popular blog about technology in Africa that you might be interested in, he's recently been recognized for his efforts by some pretty big players like Google. http://appfrica.net/blog/

Keeping Time

I just had a meeting canceled on me because I was running 10-15 minutes late, this is actually early for African meeting standards, at least from my experience, but the meeting was with an American who apparently hasn't adjusted to life here. With meeting times, if we muzungus don't adapt to the idea that meetings will always start between 15 min and 1.5 hrs late, we won't last very long here without some sort of break down.

For those of you who may be visiting for work, or are new to this idea, here are some tips:

1. Bring something to work on - this way you won't get too enraged/worried about the work that you're not doing back at the office.

2. Bring something to read - I caught on to this one in the Peace Corps when I didn't have a laptop to haul around with me, incidentally it was the two most literary years of my entire life.

3. Show up late - I haven't really adjusted to this one, as it seems to perpetuate the whole problem. But then again, as per the story above, I guess I have kind of adjusted... I've heard stories about government officials purposely showing up an hour late to big meetings because they know it won't start until then. Then again, the Prime Minister here just shows up on time and berates the diplomats and government officials who show up even 5 minutes late.

4. Schedule the meeting for an hour earlier than you need it to start - This one works well if the meeting is at your place of work or where you'll be anyway