Graham,
I was at a recent open source conference in Senegal, when I presented
some of our work I mentioned asterisk... people hadn't heard of it
(generally), and these are the leaders of open source in Africa. Since
the conference however a number of these people have started to look
into asterisk and are quite excited about it. In West Africa there are
only small pockets of open source use. Among those small pockets there
are now a few looking into asterisk, but generally it'd be safe to safe
that there is little use or knowledge of asterisk here (yet).
To be honest a huge impediment to the use of asterisk is the fear of
'voip'. Telecom companies in Africa are spending a lot of energy (read
money) trying to curb voip adoption and make governments fearful of it
-- its working. In most of Africa, you require a very expensive telecom
license to use any type of voip system outside of your own institution
(and between your own sites). Where the law isn't clear, it favours
those with the license. This is unfortunate, as voip has an opportunity
to make huge bounds forward for telecommunications in Africa, though it
is likely to be stifled and take time due to poor, or restrictive
regulations.
Ian
Graham Todd wrote:
>Simon P. Ditner wrote:
>
>
>>Yep, it's fine to mail the list, it's a discussion group. At least
>>it's supposed to be. Everyone's being really quiet for some reason...
>>
>>re: Africa; That's interesting... Are you involved with geekcorps.org
>>in any way? Ian Howard[1] is in Mali[2], Africa right now working to
>>connect communities together via their local radio stations and Wifi
>>links.
>>
>>
>
>Nope ... but I am aware of their work :-) Cool that Geekcorps Mali is
>subscribed to this "Ontario" list heh heh!
>
>I work at bellanet.org/idrc.ca and most of of the related kinds of work those
>organizations support would happen through connectivityafrica.org and
>icamericas.net. One new "start up" here is www.telecentre.org (it literally
>is just getting started). They've mentioned being interested in asterisk a
>few times.
>
>I was at a VoIP conference/tradeshow and spoke with Mark Spencer !! - I tried
>to get him to autograph my Asterisk CD but the media cut in ;-) ... Some of
>the guys at the digium booth mentioned they had a few equipment distributors
>in Africa. South Africa and Egypt I think.
>
>Ian, what's your sense of Asterisk "on the ground"? Is it breaking out all
>over?
>
>
>
>>Cheers,
>>Simon
>>
>>[1] http://www.geekcorps.org/default.asp?l1i=1&l2i=4&l3i=418
>>[2] http://mali.geekcorps.org/
>>
>>On 6/22/05, Graham Todd <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>This is cool.
>>>
>>>
>
>... [snip] ...
>
>
>
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