- “How are you?” is a standard part of the greeting ritual, even in contexts such as shops where English custom is barely to acknowledge a greeting. For all that, the greeting is no less ritualised than in England, and any non-positive response to the question seems like it would generate surprise. In fact, the protocol is sufficiently habituated that even if your responses come out of order, it barely seems to derail things.
- The roads vary from bad to terrible to “pretty much just a matter of convention”. This is made more difficult by the large numbers of pedestrians, and at night by the almost complete lack of street lighting. Much as I hate driving with an automatic transmission on the open road, given the constant speeding up and slowing down to weave round pedestrians, pot-holes and speed bumps not worrying about changing gear is actually a benefit. The speed bumps are often unmarked, and the easiest way to spot them is that men tend to stand in the middle of them, taking advantage of the slowing down of traffic to sell you mobile phone top-ups.
- Speaking of mobile phones, I think the growth in mobile phone usage surprised even the mobile phone industry. On the surface of it you might assume that people who struggle to afford to eat wouldn’t be bothering with phones, but they are big business over here, and not just among the middle classes. The prevalence of pay as you go credit sold in tiny amounts and of extremely cheap handsets (I’m using a $10 handset for the duration of my stay, and it’s as good as my old Nokia 3310 of a decade ago) has meant that owning a phone is the rule and not the exception.
- There’s a class hierarchy that I find it hard to get used to. For sure, England has rich and poor people, but middle-class guilt and inverted snobbery mean that class is almost never explicitly referred to. I’ll have more to say on this later, as I feel it’s worth a whole post in itself.
- The money takes some getting used to. Like many developing countries, Zambia has had its problems with inflation, to the point where 5,000 kwacha will just about buy $1 US. When inflation first started to bite, products were starting to be priced in the thousands but the largest banknote available was still a 20. People took to pinning notes in bundles of 1000 kwacha, hence “pin” remained as slang for 1000 kwacha. Even now, 50,000 (roughly $10 US) is the largest note and I genuinely have trouble closing my wallet.
Posts Tagged ‘Zambia’
Things I’ve observed in my first week in Zambia
Saturday, September 4th, 2010The challenges of internet in Zambia
Saturday, August 28th, 2010I’ve done my first full day of work in Zambia now, and I’m starting to get an appreciation of the unique challenges of running an ISP in an under-developed country. The technology within the country is good (WIMAX is pretty well-developed, and there’s good Wi-Fi coverage) but the difficulty is getting data in from outside the country.
Despite the arrival of fibre connections to the outside world in recent months, satellite is still the most cost-effective means of getting ISP traffic across the border. This is mostly because satellite bandwidth can be purchased in simplex, while buying fibre bandwidth involves paying for a massively under-utilised outbound connection. Obviously the satellite connection boosts the latency, so there’s a lot of trouble doing QoS so that customers who need the latency guarantees get routed to fibre.
The fact that satellite bandwidth is competetive at all should immediately tell you that bandwidth is a significant cost to the business. The economics of selling to a market of relatively poor people don’t stack if you have to buy relatively expensive bandwidth to serve them at a ratio of anything like 1:1. Caching and mirroring would seem to help, but it isn’t 1997 any more: most of what people do on the web isn’t static. You can’t cache Facebook. Even seemingly static pages often have enough dynamic content that you can’t reliably cache them. Mirroring the likes of Google search and YouTube might help, but you can’t get far without negotiating with the big boys, and they may not have time for such a small market.
Traffic shaping is another major opportunity to save bandwidth. No matter how unpopular the idea might be with Californian Slashdotters, in these circumstances the only alternative to an ISP that attempts to prioritise email over bittorrent at peak times is an ISP that goes bust and provides no service at all.
First impressions of Zambia
Friday, August 27th, 2010I’ve noticed that while city centres are the public face of the region, and airports are steel-and-glass monuments to cultural homogeneity, the surroundings as you travel from airport to city often gives an insight into what lies below the surface. New York is seedy, Paris is over-commercialised, Miami is pretty but vacuous, and London is depressing and impersonal.
Judged by this standard, Zambia fares quite well. The land is flat, dry, and under-developed, but it has a genuineness about it that immediately appeals. When I last came a few years ago, the most striking sight was of people walking alongside the road carrying sacks on their heads. It seemed to me that there were fewer of them this time round, and more people transporting goods by bicycle.
Apparently a cyclist transporting 4 large sacks of charcoal might earn 10,000 kwacha for a day’s effort in the hot sun. That would just about buy a sliced loaf in the supermarket we frequent.
