Comments, Impersonation, Etc There are a few people who have been impersonated on this site and one asked me to delete their impersonator's comments. Blogger isn't letting me delete individual comments, so I've hidden all of them until I can get that working. [Fixed -- fire away!] posted by z at 1:21 PM 19 comments
Cell Phones in Southern Sudan Reuters reports that Network of the World has invested in cell phone and internet services in southern Sudan.
Fighting had left southern Sudan a black spot for telecommunications until last August when the region's first mobile phone operator -- Network of the World (NOW) -- was set up with a multimillion dollar investment.
Satellite dishes, generators, computers, a telecoms mast and a wooden shed for an Internet cafe were transported piecemeal to the bush, by convoy and chartered plane.
Despite a chronic lack of trained technicians and engineers in southern Sudan, a network was up and running within four months.
The new mast stands at a site dominated by an enormous dilapidated satellite dish, intended for a fixed line phone system. Government troops bombed the dish in the 1980s before it had a chance to get started.
There are now about 1,000 subscribers to NOW in two towns -- Rumbek and Yei, and Richard Herbert, NOW's operations director, is confident that number will increase five-fold by the end of the year.
As far as I can tell, NOW.com was previously providing an integrated video and internet service to a few hundred thousand people in Hong Kong, after an initial attempt to make itself a pan-asian complete digital media service provider. This new effort sounds very hopeful, but I'd love to learn more.