Alex Little

Last weekend I arrived back in Mekelle after our training week in Addis. Only a few differences to note since I’ve been back, the new road (I’ve been watching League of Gentlemen again) still isn’t finished, a couple of new restaurants have opened and a few have closed. The price capping that was introduced a couple of months ago has affected the availability of some goods quite a lot. For example in one restaurant, because bottled soft drinks are price capped, they now only sell canned soft drinks. St Georges and Dashen beers are capped, but Castell isn’t, so some places now only sell Castell as they can charge what they like for it.

The thin client computer labs are returning to being open. The lab for Technology Institute has been closed since the break in a few weeks ago and has only just this week been passed back to Technology from Security. Some new lab attendants have started this week, so the labs should be running again properly next week. We also hope to get a second lab open and running before the end of next week, but just need to keep our fingers crossed that the switches needed will arrive in the next few days.

The internet connection, both the fiber access at the uni and the CDMA, have been very slow. Generally they are on, but almost so slow as to be unusable. Many people seem to think the change in management of Ethiopia Telecom means staff are uncertain about their jobs so the network isn’t well maintained. An alternative explanation is that they’ve sold too many CDMA sim cards and increased the bandwidth they claim to deliver far above the actual capacity of the network. Either way, it’s disappointing that the connections are now worse than they were less than a year ago.

During my week in Addis I met several people form IT companies who are interested in providing thin client support services, so it’s interesting to see the types of projects they’ve been working on and that cheaper, more reliable computing infrastructure is now becoming more widespread. There is also talk of some thin client devices being assembled here in Ethiopia – actually the device I’ve seen would run either standalone or as a thin client. This would make the thin clients more mainstream, much cheaper and as they could be paid for in local currency, buyers would be supporting the local economy.

This week we continue our elearning training at Mekelle University, we have the final workshops for two training programme we started in October and hope to start a new advanced group. Hoping that everyone is as active and engaged as the participants were in Addis last week.

I’ve just moved back to my old house in Northampton and have been trying to figure out if there is a way to get a decent broadband connection at home but without a 12+ month contract. there do seem to be a few places which offer shorter contracts (1 or 3 month notice), but then a phone line is also needed – which again, requires a 12 month contract. Plus for the short term contracts, there is a connection fee. The only place I found that would offer short term broadband plus phone was IDnet (http://www.idnet.net) – but this is going to be an expensive option. £17.99 per month for broadband, £10 per month for line rental and £47 connection fee = total of £130.97 for 3 months (or about £44 per month). I’m currently using a o2 mobile broadband dongle (£15 per month or 3Gb download), so works out at £45 for 3 months, unless I start going over the 3Gb limit (very likely). Although even with allowing for spending on extra downloads, this will still works out much cheaper. If anyone has any better, cheaper suggestions (not including hacking a neighbours wireless connection!), I’d be very interested to hear.

The main downside I’ve found with the mobile broadband is the speed, it’s noticeably slower than fixed line broadband – although with the connection speeds I had in Ethiopia, the mobile broadband in UK is a vast improvement in terms of both speed and cost. Whilst in Addis the other day I noticed that the CDMA internet connection was far slower than that available in Mekelle, I expect as a result of the number of people using CDMA now and the lack of capacity in the infrastructure. As a result more people are buying EVDO connections – these are monthly contracts and quite expensive (approx 460 birr per month minimum). If EVDO becomes too popular it’s only a matter of time before these seem slow and unreliable.

Apart from these hassles, moving back to the house has been good. Realised just how much stuff I managed to pack into the loft, so have spent the last couple of days moving everything down and getting it sorted out. Most of which I’ll get rid of in one form or another (freecycle, charity shops etc).

Ethiopian Telecoms Company (ETC) started to provide a pre-paid mobile internet service several months ago, though as I (usually) have a good connection at work, I’ve never really considered purchasing a dongle and setting up an account for myself. However, my housemate Martin, with not having a computer, let alone internet connection through work, recently set himself up with CDMA.

The dongle comes with a driver/installation CD for Windows, so this morning I thought I’d have a go getting it set up on my laptop running Ubuntu 9.04. Getting it all set up proved to be much more straightforward than I had anticipated. Here’s what I needed to do:

1. Install wvdial (I have Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook remix, so if you have the normal desktop version this step may not be necessary): sudo apt-get install wvdial

2. Plug the CDMA dongle into a USB port

3. At the terminal enter: sudo wvdialconf

4. Then enter: sudo gedit /etc/wvdial.conf

5. In the text editor change the block that reads:

; Phone =
; Password =
; Username =

to be:

Phone = #777
Password = etc
Username = etc

Then save and close the editor. Note that the username and password should be in lower case.

6. At the terminal enter: sudo wvdial

7. Without closing the terminal open the browser and you should be connected.

Now that it’s working I have the opportunity to spend huge amounts of money using the internet whilst at home. I’m not sure of the exact tariff, but given our usage so far it seems to be around 0.5 birr per minute (approx 2p).