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the great fiber provider | the lunch media coffee break and backup (pt1)

everyone loves coffee or tea breaks. everyone finds backups normally a chore.

imagine having the ability to go to a hyperlocal cafe that sourced sustainable items from the locality, then imagine that cafe could be broadcasting via various methods when those items arrive, when pastries or breads have been cooked (aka bakertweet style - check the tweets) and are hot and ready for eating. fresh. connecting the locality with updates and a daily farmers market approach with supplies knowing how much demand their is instead of things going to waste, optimising the experience both sides and in realtime. updating your clients in what they are familiar with, via email, or text or mobile updates.

You sit down in the lovely surroundings of the national forest cafe with this amazingly fast internet connectivity and your working at high speed doing video chats in high quality whilst enjoying the pacing that being in the heart of the national forest can bring. In the background one of our staff has helped you setup your computer to automatically upload all your data on your laptop securely, encrypted and private to a secure hosted location on the internet - 15/20 minutes of your time over lunch and your whole laptop is backed up due to the super fast internet connectivity - not tapes, not backup devices - all stored remotely and even the biggest hard drives we have currently can be done within an hour of you having lunch. automatically, the background and with no tech, geeky stress.

Just one example how using high speed fiber connectivity could take technology worries about losing your valuable pictures, videos and work while your sitting relaxing having lunch from a local food supplier.

tech/geeky note
the reason why offsite backups have not really taken off in this country yet are mainly down to the fact that upload speeds in this country are terrible, the uploading part of your internet connection are required to send your data to a secure, safe hosted location on the internet - these are normally called server farms and lots of new locations are popping up (including one in dublin from microsoft which is aiming to be as eco friendly as possible) - not having to worry about backing up your computer and being able to have your machine do what is required in the background is a liberating experience. i use both backblaze and the carbonite products and find them perfect for my needs.

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the great fiber provider | my real world example series

I've always been excited about the speed of communication.

'In 1988, AT&T installed the first transatlantic fiber optic telephone link. It carried 37,800 simultaneous voice conversations in each direction on a pair of fibers'

Ever since the time i played with a walkie talkie for the first time as a child and remembering being able to see my father at the bottom of the garden with his lips moving and my eye flarings looking at the speaker grill on the box i had in my hand, my ears trying to compute this robot/digital voice that sounded like my dad but a different futuristic version of him - i knew then pretty early on that tech and gadgets were the items of my scifi imagination - entering into the 80's with a flair for all things radioshack and tandy on a saturday morning would serve my desire for more. where this was going too. what could i access, what could i find. I'll probably backtrack at some point and put all the words and context down for my daughter to listen to - the history as i remember it in little audio snippits for her to remember her father by.

Anyway!

Fiber, big chunky super duper connections, pieces of glass, huge capacity to fire light down them and wrap data in them at amazingly fast speeds. systems to push the data down these pieces of glass get faster all the time, need only to replace the 'boxes' on each end for new ways to use light in pulses to send massive streams of information and you can pack a huge amount of data into one thin strand of fibre. Amazing stuff for pushing/pulling data, traffic, your internet, your voice, your video chat. at amazingly fast speeds - the speed of light.

Did you also know that in the uk we have 80% broadband penetration but are probably around 20/21st in the world in terms of actual speed of internet connectivity. We are so far behind, the digital britain report tells us that they see that everyone will have at least 2 megabytes of internet connectivity by 2010. It's not enough, in fact i would argue the fact that if we maintain on this path to only suggest that we are capable of supporting that for the masses that you will an even more rapid decline in the amount our country exports and also not being able to be dynamic and fast enough to adopt/adapt changes in the digital space from our creative sectors.

Simple put, the internet connectivity we desire has become as familiar as electricity, it's becoming a utility - when we flick the switch to boot out computer we expect our connection to the world to be there. even businesses require instant/always on connectivity about their employees in some way these days and we will see accelerate more and more as people see the cost benefits not only to 'getting things done' but to the environmentally concerns that are crucial that we start to adhere to. I see our biggest export in the decade to come is the content of our multifaceted array of nationalities and the dynamics of those people that have come together as one and can work around each other in this fantastic country of ours.

So, to my series. i want to provide people with real world, working examples of why having a super fast internet connection, mainly supplied by fibre and ultimately piped out over wifi aerials (in a rural location like we plan) is so valuable not from just the perspective of having better than you have currently but also what the effects on for people when you do go faster. the benefits you can put in place for a local economy, how the sustainability aspect can be given me thought when you can do things faster, when you have a high speed reliable connection in place to be able to produce media and 'get it out there' instead of being held back by the constraints of your internet connectivity. how it take away those frustration moments from people that 'do not do computers' - how making technology effortless can actually fit into your day to day pipeline of our busy lives. when your going this fast, it no longer becomes about the technology behind it but the way we model it for a more broader section of our community.

I hope you'll enjoy the series - i also hope you will leave comments and maybe other suggests of 'applications' of having high speed fiber connectivity and what it can bring. Oh, while your here - do check on the image i attached to this blog entry and have a look at some of the countries that already have high speed connectivity in their country already, then look at the speed versus cost.

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the illusion of the 'upto' speeds broadband speed adverts

you have seen the adverts. upto 8 meg, up to 20 meg.

chances are you will hardly ever hit those kind of speeds. in fact i would go as far to say that most people think they have those speeds already and are totally unaware that they are probably only touching 15%-20% of a decent connection. add to that fact hidden programs, virus and bots uploading/downloading things in the background and you can understand why people get frustrated with 'the internet' even before you start talking about 'social media making' - we need to educate.

i'm finding out that most people in a rural location have very very poor internet connectivity. if i'm to prove that having hi-speed internet connectivity in an area is valuable we need to educate a few people about the difference in upload/download speeds and connectivity in general. until people experience the value of what can be done with an internet connection of a certain speed and what it can open them up too, trying to explain social media to people who do not have the technology in place to upload without frustration will always fall on deaf ears.

finding out your upload and download speed
as a basic rule of thumb your internet connection is split into two parts. the download part (which is often faster than the upload) and the upload (the side of your internet connection that sends things up to the internet) - now most of the time for surfing the internet and listening to music and videos your going to be using the download side of your internet connection - the faster that is, the higher the number the faster your downloading of content will be. this is the side of your connection that the majority of people will use. the upload side of your internet connection is often a lot slower than your download speed (you should look into why this is on wikipedia if interested) - uploading is often used for sending - so email, submitting forms and searches and obviously pushing media to store on the internet. this often can be the biggest problem for media makers in that it can be frustrating to send media to the internet due to the time constraints of having to plan ahead of time or scheduling this to happen. A lot of people do not have the time and give in at this stage because of the extra effort required to publish and create media content for the web. For checking your internet connection i would check out http://speedtest.net to find out your upstream/download speeds and http://www.pingtest.net for testing other issues that might be effecting your internet line.

you and the local exchange
lots of things effect how good your actual connection can be but one of the main ones is your distance away from your local exchange and
what kinds of connectivity that exchange has been enabled for. I'm quite lucky in that my exchange is adsl2 enabled and i'm not too far away from it. i get around 6meg download and just over 1meg upload - for me, for sending media it is 'ok'

reboot that router
need to do some video chatting online via skype with your relatives abroad? - reboot that router for 10 minutes before doing so may just refresh your internet connection to make it more smooth for you. leaving a router on over night is not only an environmental concern - if your not running a server from home then you really should look at switching it off.

check your congestion and ratios
most people take the basic, cheapest package when it comes to broadband but often people really need a lot more than they get. if your working an internet business from home you really should be looking at the business offering as they often have better ratios in peak time and getting some kind of level of support is often a lot quicker - i've also noticed you tend to get more detailed status reports. trust me, it is worth the extra cash.

I'll be releasing a series of videos over the course of this month regarding what a nice, chunky internet connection could enable you and the businesses and community around you to do that your current connection probably cannot. i hope you will enjoy the videos and will show you that by bringing high speed internet connectivity to an area can change the dynamics of the community.

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chat with garry beale - awellconnected.com regarding bringing fibre & national forest.

I had the chance to speak to a very busy garry beale tonight about the potential project of providing a fibre connection into the heart of the national forest. I'm actually starting to think that the actually initial installation should be funded by 'the community' of sponsors and then we rent the roof/space at conkers for the aerial offsetting that with giving them connectivity for a variety of uses. I'm thinking streaming from the amphitheatre and obviously really good streaming for the whole of next years projected conkertu events.   Once the radio/feed is in we could resell to other local businesses once they can see the speeds compared to what they are currently being provided for.

It's all rather exciting.

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On Conferences, Chairs, Breakfasts and Wifi Crashes

Think about the following three scenarios for a moment ...

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More piracy/privacy bungling from our government

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Useful online tools for slow connections

I'm a fan of cloud computing and in an ideal world I'd use a web interface for pretty much everything (even graphic design) but when you're working in a country with universally slow internet connectivity it's about as much use as a 56k modem (i.e. not very useful at all).

Here's a few tips for people who want/need to communicate online but don't have the connection speed. Don't forget - just because you don't have a fast internet connection doesn't mean your audience is in the same situation. If you work for a non-profit you might need to communicate work in the field back to donors in the West. Even if you can't watch the video or read the Tweet other people can.

Use Posterous

The reason I'm using Posterous for this blog is the exact same reason I'm recommending it. I think it has the best email-to-web functionality of any blogging system and it has a ton of other nice features. One of the things you can generally rely on when you have slow (or almost no) internet connectivity is email. Before I had regular internet access in the office I was strictly an internet cafe man. I would download my email quickly(ish) to Thunderbird (you could use Outlook or whatever else), disconnect, write my replies and then reconect to send. Simple and cheap. If I had used Gmail's web interface (even in HTML mode) this would have been an expensive and deeply irritating process. I tried to update a Wordpress blog online for a while. It was a nightmare.

What's great about Posterous is that you barely need to go online to set it up. Sure, to get some of the extra features (which are well worth having) you'll have to go online to do a bit of set up but essentially you can have a blog without ever using a web browser. Just email anything to post@posterous.com and you're up and running. Pretty cool. You can attach pretty much every useful file type to your email and it will display them nicely - photos in galleries, video and audio in sleek players etc. You can even attach pdfs which I think is a great feature for not-for-profits and NGOs who publish research, press releases etc. I don't think other blogging platforms let you do this but I'm willing to be corrected.

The best feature for those with slow connections however is the integration with sites like Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. You can upload once to Posterous and it will update all your other sites with the relevant media and text automatically. Photos go to Flickr, videos to YouTube and blog subject and shortened url to Twitter and/or Facebook for example. For anyone who has spent a day trying to upload the same information or media to multiple sites you'll know how much time this can save. And that's if you have a good connection. If you're on a slow connection you might as well forget about it.

...or another blog site or CMS

I'm banging on about Posterous as if it was the only option but for a lot of bloggers it won't have all the features you need. Categories will be the biggest omission for most. Luckily most of the big blogging platforms will let you email posts. I think Wordpress' functionality is the best - you can drop posts into categories, images are automatically displayed as a simgle image or gallery for multiple images, you can upload video and audio (though only if you've upgraded) and there's plenty of other useful stuff.

Since Wordpress is generally a good option for small NGOs who are just starting out online this email functionality should make it an attractive option for people taking their first steps into digital in the developing world. This assumes of course that you can get online for long enough to do the initial set up. I've found Wordpress pretty slow going in Zambia but with a bit of patience it should be do-able.

You can also set up the Wordpress CMS to receive email updates which is pretty cool but like Drupal (below) it requires a bit of technical know-how.

Blogger has fewer features for emailers but it still works and I certainly wouldn't recommend switching to another one unless you have a) extremely slow connectivity and b) need the full blown features of Wordpress or Posterous.

For Drupalistas (that's people who love the Drupal CMS to you and I) there's a module called Mailhandler that does a similar job to Wordpress but you'll probably want to get someone technical to install and set it up. Hopefully you have access to such a person if you're using Drupal already. This looks like a good option for NGOs/not-for-profits who have multiple bloggers across the world who are likely to have very different internet connection speeds but I haven't tried it out so there's every chance it could be a disaster...

Use TubeMogul (or similar)

If you're thinking about using video then posting on your blog is a good start. For real impact though you'll want to get content on all the big video sites. Sadly, when your connection is crawling this just isn't possible. That's where TubeMogul comes in. You upload to them and they distibute to about 25 different video sites including YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, imeem, MetaCafe etc. etc. That's a lot of time saved for you and a lot of eyes on your video.

Get stats mailed to you

This seems simple but if you have a site that's using Google Analytics (and indeed, many other analytics packages) you can get stats mailed to you rather than using the web interface. It's going to save you a lot of time and actually I think this is sensible anyway because you get into the habit of analysing at regular intervals rather than ad hoc.

If you only do one thing use Twitter

Until recently my Zambian mobile didn't want to update my Twitter profile by SMS. Pretty rude I thought. But that now seems to be resolved and I can text away to my heart's content. Sadly receiving updates to a Zambian cell is still out of the question so the two-way conversation that Twitter is so good at falls down a bit. Still, as a broadcast tool (maybe having Tweets displayed on your brand new Wordpress site?) it's still great and you can usually rely on the mobile networks much more than the internet out here so if you really need to let people know about something it's a great option.

This is just a quick overview off the top of my head. I'm sure there's hundreds more useful tools out there. If you've seen (or used) any of them I'd love to hear about your experience, especially if you used them in the non-profit context.

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Upgraded connection

I started having problems with the connection speed a couple of months ago. I decided to upgrade to the fastest available for home users in UY,  which is a 4Mb Down / 512 K Up. The upload speed still sucks and in this age of collaboration and sharing, it is not only outdated but just unbelievable that this is what toy get for almost 100 dollars.

   Anyway hare are the speedtest.net results for the new connection:

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Scaling Internet Growth in Africa

IT training for kids who live in the surrounding farm areas of Stutterheim outside East London in the Eastern Cape. South Africa. Photo: Trevor Samson / World Bank

It has been a famous rallying cry that Africa’s internet growth will continue skyrocketing. Research studies have proved the possibility of a viable market within certain countries in the continent. With the introduction of various fiber optic projects across the continent, faster and cheaper internet will become a major benefit for internet connectivity in Africa.

Internet penetration within the continent sits at 5.6% while the rest of the world enjoys a 26.9% average. Within Africa, the only countries with penetration higher than 20% include: Mauritius (26.7% of 1.275 million people), Reunion (27.4% of 803,209 people), Seychelles (37.0% of 86,595 people) and Tunisia (27.0% of 10.38 million people). Morocco is close to breaking the 20% barrier at 19.2% of 34.3 million people. Penetration within these countries allows the web to play a greater role in the everyday lives of people with access. Other than Tunisia and Morocco, most of these countries have a small population within tiny island nations allowing for greater penetration.

While it is true that the web will become a force in Africa, it won’t be so without a few deliberate decisions on both the part of policy makers and business people. Currently, the web is used to access outside destinations and information in most African countries.

Why is this significant? Until the internet experience is relevant to day to day operations of a people, it is very hard to make it a must have tool. In the US, the web is used from when one wakes up till the moment they retire to sleep. A single day will have someone checking email, reading the news, catching up on blogs, shopping, interacting with friends, banking, work intranets, learning through research, entertainment, and many more. Within Africa, I have found that the internet is used effectively by a select few. For everyone else, this is a great tool for communicating and meeting people through social networks such as Facebook.

Browsing through the Top Sites per country on Alexa.com is an interesting experience. In the US, the first foreign site ranked that I could identify is BBC at number 55. I think of a foreign site as one where content is created predominantly for a country outside your own. The Google country versions are a special case and I will treat it as such. Outside of the US, whenever you type google.com, the country version shows up instead of the global site. So I treat Google country sites as a similar iteration to the global site. Out of the top 100 sites within the US, I could only identify BBC as a foreign site.

In Japan, China and the UK, I found US sites but also a good amount of local web sites relevant to the country. In China for example, none of the global powerhouses such as Google and Yahoo led the way. These country leading sites cover a wide range of fields from shopping, recreation, local and government services, entertainment, news, resources and many others.

In Africa, this is not the case. The top Nigerian site ranks 16^th among the leading sites. Nigeria though has around 22 sites within its top 100. South Africa’s first site is ranked 8^th with a healthy 42 sites within its top 100. Egypt’s top site is ranked 8^th while Morocco’s is 9^th. Kenya’s top site is 12^th with 25 sites amongst the top 100.

In my opinion, until African governments start investing in better websites to assist its citizenry, until corporations both large and small start delivering services or improve workflows online; we will always trail the rest of the world. While connection speeds and the drop in prices are major factors in the growth of web penetration, so will the delivery of every day services that consumers and citizens expect from their corporations and governments respectively.

Cheaper internet will mean more people will have a chance to go online. But how sustainable will the web be in Africa without great local content? We can all visit Facebook and BBC and laugh at YouTube videos, but we need local content outside of news to make the internet a truly living and breathing organism. Services such as job and real estate searches, car buying, shopping, local entertainment and the like will be important.

This brings me to the final missing piece that I think is as relevant as a conscious shift in strategy by both governments and corporations. Online Payment Services. Discussion on payment services will require a separate post, but until a payment system is established in Africa that is respected and accepted by both locals and the world at large, ecommerce in Africa will be a dud. Fraud has rocked so many banks and online payment services. For every new payment product made available, a hundred hackers try to figure out a way to steal from them. This has become a major pain for most companies and international ones have learnt to avoid Africa like the plague. We need a stable, robust and scalable solution that work in most African countries. Once that is established, I think we will be on our way to realizing the potential of the web and the smart phones in Africa.

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Innovation

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