[syndicate] Re: the price of connectivity and download

[Are Flagan]

Re: 6/8/03 6:01 PM, "anna balint" <epistolaris at freemail.hu>:

> Dear Natalie Myers,
> 
> if would be curious, you could look up on the net a table
> of prices and of average incomes.
> I know that in Hungary more than 90% of the net users
> access the net through dial up connection and they
> pay one of the highest Telecom use in Europe,
> while the avarage income is about 300 Euros.
> Or I know that i lost contact with my Russian colleague,
> who was before connected at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow,
> but the whole department's connection was cut down from the net,
> since the Academy was able to pay the bills,
> and I also know that my friend was earning at that time,
> last year, 50 USD per a month.
> greetings,
> Anna Balint
> 


Africa is, according to information once circulated on a public software
list, even worse off. Most access points are through cybercafés, but the
dial ups that are available are a) prohibitively expensive and b) so slow
that even graphical content is unfeasible except at the most advantageous
times (baud rate of 10, apparently). The bottleneck of capitalism is both
last mile vultures and the prices charged by western telecoms for fiber or
satellite to and from the continent. Then there's a place like Myanmar,
where the Internet is GOV only and an email account is $150 per year (of
course, that price is an even more effective exclusion policy). I never
could find a complete overview of Internet access costs, but a search at
individual TLDs and various ISPs under each would obviously compile a
representative sample. (http://www.tsunamii.net is doing some documentation
in relation to a project they are doing right now -- migrating their DNS to
44 countries around the world.) The "Internet" is not exactly as flat and
level as that flashy 500K flash intro for the IT biz suggests.