Message-ID: <199701102306.BAA04198@linux.lisse.na> Date: Sat, 11 Jan 1997 01:06:37 +0200 From: Dr Eberhard W Lisse <mailto:el@LISSE.NA> Subject: Re: cost of receiving DEVEL-L in Africa To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
Susan,thanks for the support.
>For the benefit of those who have not lived in Africa (and I understand at
>least the poorer parts of Asia are the same):
>>From many parts of Africa itelephone costs 20-30 dollars a minute. Salaries
>range around 200-400 dollars a month for the middle-class (including
Your figure might even be on the high side.
>professors and researchers). Group servers that bring these messages down
This has been said numerous times, the RIO for example as a wide spread network, costs 3 French Francs per KB incoming and outgoing. And the money has to be paid to France.
They use X25 which is 7 bit only so unless you compress below 50% you won't get anything out of it.
The operators are not interested in doing anything about compression, quoting that it's too difficult under sendmail. Well, took me a weekend to get it working on my box, most of it reading the sendmail bible, but then I don't just do a year abroad to dodge the draft into the French Army.
FIDO's compression is much overrated because to my knowledge only gzip's compression is picked up by the modem.
>share the cost among a number of people but still severely restrict what can
>come because of these cost factors - and it often costs individuals
>considerable money to download from the local servers by telephone in
And, the telephone system is so bad in most places that you can't get it on the first attempt...
[...] >
>At 20:53 9/1/97 +0000, Reinaldo Vicini wrote:
>>Dear friends:
>>
>>i wonder how expensive is expensive? To load ten long messages at
>>14.4 Kb does not take more than 30 sec. Is that going to really a
>>penalty that expensive?
Shouldn't someone claiming to know about development have a bit of an idea what is going on in developing countries? Infrastucture, costs, regulation and the like?
I rest my case.
el
-- Dr. Eberhard W. Lisse \ / Swakopmund State Hospital mailto:<el@lisse.NA> * | Resident Medical Officer Private Bag 5004 \ / +264 64 461503 (pager) 461005 (h) 461004 (f) Swakopmund, Namibia ;____/ Zone/Domain Contact for the NA-DOM Vice-Chairman, Board of Trustees, Namibian Internet Development Foundation, an Association not for Gain. NAMIDEF is the Namibian Internet Service Provider.