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Net booms in Kabul
Our camel's nose in their Islamic tent...Line of sight is a curious thing. For 20 years, the clear view of Kabul from its surrounding hills gave successive factions perfect aim to fire rockets into the city. But now, less than two years after the Taliban were removed from power, that same line of sight is being used to provide wireless internet access. For Kabul the future is arriving at last: the city is experiencing an internet boom. Without any infrastructure to build upon, the Afghans are rushing to install wireless connections across the city. Internet cafes are appearing in every neighbourhood, mobile phones are the must-have item, e-government initiatives are transforming the way the country is run, and e-commerce is kicking off. And even while the official infrastructure struggles to produce electricity for more than a few hours a day, home-built antennae pointed at the hills are producing an ad hoc broadband network faster, cheaper, and simpler than anything in the UK. But having access to the internet is one thing: knowing what to do with it quite another. To this end, the UN Development Programme is training more than 1,800 people in basic computer skills. The priority is to train the civil service and local government staff, and then move on to academia and the public. "We start with a package of MS Office training," says Mahmood Zahir, information and communication technology programme assistant for the UNDP, "where we teach our students an introduction to computers - Windows XP - and then Word, Excel, PowerPoint and an introduction to the internet. We also teach an introduction to the paperless office." For the country's civil service, Zahir says, the arrival of computers has been a revolution in itself, never mind getting on to the internet. Going from pen and paper and typewriter to the latest desktop machines has meant that tasks that would have taken all day are done in 10 minutes. Jobs such as completing the office's payroll are greatly simplified, and the office workers are keen to adopt IT when they see how much time it saves them. "You have to remember that this country has been through 23 years of war," Zahir says, "and now all that everyone is interested in is development, and they say that the root of all success is in computers." Training on one Office program costs $5 (£3), and $45 for a complete four month-long course in Windows and the entire Office suite. As the UNDP uses private firms to do this training, a small training industry is developing. The practical differences are obvious. By networking the government, and connecting provincial capitals to Kabul over the internet, the civil servants are solving a problem that has long hampered Afghanistan. In the days of typewriters and the postal service, it would take weeks for news of a regulation or law to make its way to the provinces. With the birth of the Afghan e-government, nationwide policy can be instigated with a single email. While this might be obvious for the average developed-world corporate employee, the difference it is making to a country of 22m with little infrastructure is marked. It's so successful that the priority for outlying regions is to connect them to the net, for email and instant messaging especially, before connecting them to the telephone system.
Connecting Afghanistan's networks to the world isn't easy. The nearest landline connections, in Pakistan, are on the wrong side of a mountain range and some lawless tribal areas. Laying a cable from Kabul to Peshawar would be neither cheap nor convenient. Instead, the local ISPs, non-governmental organisations and government rely on satellite connections. This means that Afghanistan's internet traffic is routed through a handful of bottlenecks, which can cause problems. Wais, the manager of the Afghan.com cafe, one of the 20 or so such cafes in the city, knows this only too well. On the day I visited, their connection, which serves 150 customers a day, was unusably slow - the result of the SoBig.F virus overwhelming a data centre in New York, The Guardian quoted him as saying. Like all the internet cafes in Kabul, the Afghan.com cafe has been a success since opening in May. Frequented by staff from the nearby offices of NGOs and embassies, the business is using the money to open a cheaper branch in a residential area and convert the building opposite into a showroom: Wais is opening the first official HP Compaq service and distribution centre in Afghanistan. Dell's is just down the street. The major hardware brands are in for a fight. Unlike Microsoft, which is on a level playing field with free- of-charge Linux because the pirate versions of their titles are easily obtainable around the city, companies such as HP and Dell are going to have to fight a hard battle on price. A case in point: the UNDP buys its machines, fully branded Dell boxes from Malaysia, for around $2,000 each. Similarly specified systems, without the Dell badge, go for a quarter of that in Kabul.
This chain of training is precisely what Afghanistan needs, according to Muhammad Aslam, the technical manager of the .af domain. "We have to get people trained, but after the training it won't do anything if those people do not go on and train others." If anything shows the development of the country, Aslam's job is it. One of the first tasks of the interim government was to recover the ownership of the .af internet domain. It succeeded - and Aslam now controls the registration of all .af domain names. "Anyone can register an .af domain," he says, "as long as they provide documents that show they are entitled to the name." It costs $20 for Afghans and $100 for foreign companies and, so far, Aslam has registered 95 domains, including CNN.af and BBC.af. Western media companies, especially, are keen to protect their trademarks. The latest registrant? CartoonNetwork.af. In Aslam's office, high up in the Ministry of Communications building - by far the tallest in the city - he shows me the server that shares control of the entire .af domain. It sits by his desk, and hums hopefully. "Of course, this isn't the only server: we have another in New York," he says. "If it was, the power cuts would shut down the entire domain for half of the day. "We're all working at it," he says, pointing out of the window. Another wireless link is going up on the roof below. "We're working at it."
Posted by: Fred Pruitt 2003-11-08 |
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