The next time your ISP's number is eternally engaged, spare a thought for the missionary nuns in Tanzania. To send and receive email they have to save outbound messages on a disk and drive 20 miles by jeep to the nearest missionary organisation with Internet access.
It's not exactly online, but to the Medical Missionaries of Mary (MMM) at Makiungu hospital it's still a huge improvement over snail mail, which takes up to four weeks to deliver messages and still loses many into the bargain. However, a project at Kevin Street College of Technology and Trinity College Dublin might improve things even further, providing MMM staff in remote areas of developing countries with access to affordable, limited email via low earth orbit satellite (LEOSat).
Such technology is already available but too costly, so staff at Kevin Street have developed a cheaper, fixed aerial, and the Teltec Ireland group in Trinity College is developing a low-cost ground-station, supported by Telecom Eireann and Forbairt.
When ready in about a year's time, the system will provide brief connections (up to 10 or 15 minutes) around five times a day as satellites pass 600 kilometres overhead. The link speed is 9,600 baud, shared between all the base stations currently accessing the satellite. Victor Thorne, Head of the School of Electronics and Communications Engineering at Kevin Street, says messages are stored on the satellite until a ground station with Internet access - such as Kevin Street or TCD - connects and retrieves the mail.
Sister Isabelle Smyth, MMM's Director of Communications, says the system is their "only hope" for connectivity, and will mainly be used for submitting reports. "Unlike other organisations we can't afford satellite phones," she says, adding that doctors at the MMM hospitals will also use the system to access medical information and advice.
Sister Isabelle says local people should also be able to access the technology so that the missionaries are "partners, not colonists". Having seen first-hand the state of communications in "remote areas where healthcare needs are greatest", she says: "I don't think we'll see efficient telecoms infrastructure in remote parts of Africa in 10 years. Education, health and food security come first."
The first pilot groundstation will be at the hospital in Tanzania, where the government is very supportive of efforts to assist the development of rural people. The communications lifeline will then hopefully be extended to the rest of the MMM sites where Internet access is not available. The first organisation to use LEOSat technology has been the American group Volunteers in Technical Assistance, or VITA, but MMM has to wait till a cheaper version comes along.
Professor Gordon Foster of TCD, who has been associated with the project for more than two years now, says the overall project, called Trinet, will involve around 15 sites in "extremely remote locations, where there isn't any communications infrastructure at all". Describing it as a step towards the Internet, he succinctly sums up its purpose: "so the information superhighway can lead up a few muddy lanes as well".