We have been anticipating a new 3.7 meter satellite dish for our center. This will enable us to have utilize the C band instead of our current KU band internet connection.
Currently our internet connection is 2mb dl 512mb up KU which is blocked by rain and clouds and VERY costly. When it rains hard (every other day or so) we lose internet for a few minutes... downloads drop, etc. Having a download manager and uninterruptible power supply (UPS)is essential.
The concrete pad for the new dish pours today. Which means, I'll have fibre to run, and routing to configure, but once it is done, our network will be more reliable and eventually more affordable!
Technology is an interesting thing when applying it in this context. Maybe I'll blog soon about how low power computing is revolutionizing the way we do things.
This pic I took is of a neighboring dish that we used to get ideas from how to run conduit.
In preparation for this new dish we had to cut down 2 trees, both of which were about to fall over on a building anyway.
It is amazing to me that 2 years ago, this place had no internet connection faster than dial up. And now we will have 2 dishes.
We recently spoke to one of the cell phone providers in the country who is interested in mounting a Tower near here AND providing GPRS/EDGE technology (at about 80cents p/mb). If their business base for GPRS gets high enough they will consider going 3g after their initial equipment purchase is paid off. So we might see 3g cell technology in the next 3-5 years!
What this means is that our translators can stop carrying around radios and modems and heavy, costly equipment and start using netbooks, XO's and cellular modems.
It really is exciting to be a geek sometimes.
Anyway.. so while we were on our way to check out this new dish, we were alerted that there was some tribal fighting on the way. I was driving. Sure enough we see a bunch of men huddled on the road ahead. I stopped, prepared to drive backwards, but they were jsut guys helping another person out of the mud. Although each of them had either a bow and arrow or a machete, none of them were fighting at the time.
After 2 years of living here, seeing a man walking with a bow and arrow, or a bush knife (machete), doesn't strike me as unusual. I wonder if it'll be odd to see people walking around WITHOUT knives in the U.S. (-;
