Radio email in Africa

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Linux Journal writes about Radio E-mail in West Africa. It reminds me of the good old days when we used UUCP over ssh (for the compression) to fetch mail for everyone while skiing in France. Of course they have more important goals than just trying to make your customers not notice that you are on vacation.

Expecting this isolation and general lack of connectivity, I was quite astonished when we arrived in Kissi. Here I found the radio operator using his equipment to make a binary file transfer from his desktop PC to another field office, wirelessly!

I had a radio modem for my 27MHz radio way back when. It was only 300 baud or something like that though; great fun. Packet network in a point-to-point world. Of course now packet networks are everywhere. Generations growing up now in our end of the world will never know a world without them.

Bushmail, a commerical provider of Radio email, writes on their products and prices page: The annual airtime subscription for unlimited use is around $1000 - countries at war being at a much higher end of the spectrum. How is that for price differentiation? Makes dividing your customers into who favors which color face plate on their new gadget seem a bit irrelevant.

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This page contains a single entry by Ask Bjørn Hansen published on October 15, 2002 12:59 AM.

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