listen to africa

For the benefit of any other web-hungry itinerants travelling through Africa, I thought I’d share our learning experiences of managing a website and using mobile technology during our cycling tour in Africa. We’re by no means mobile experts and we’re still in the early days of the journey (Mauritania, heading south) but we’re posting our experiences now in case it helps others coming this way soon. If anyone better informed has insights (or corrections) to add, please post away in the comments.

As I’ve mentioned before, we were either going to do this trip with no web presence at all (the temptation to disappear in a Facebooked world) or go the whole hog and centre our trip around a website sharing some of Africa’s wonderfully diverse sounds and voices with as many people as possible. After some soul searching, we decided on the latter.

In our scant trip research before setting off, we briefly looked at options for updating the website from the road. We immediately discarded satellite phones as too expensive and too bulky. We toyed with the idea of using a mobile as a modem but, eventually, we decided to build a website that could be updated by Huw’s old mobile via SMS (our microblog and current location) and phone email (the blog). For other website updates, we’d use internet cafes when we found them and maybe reassess during the trip.

(As an aside, updating our location every evening has turned out to be a useful habit; we send an SMS to Brightkite with our GPS coordinates and Brightkite sends us a confirmation SMS that includes the name of the village we’re in – often our only way of knowing its name. In the Sahara, where distances on the maps have been questionable, Brightkite became especially useful, occasionally replying with “You are 52 kilometres away from X”. We’ve resisted the temptation to reply “Is there a cafe there? Cold beer? A masseuse?” Disclaimer: Brightkite also often replied with blanks as place names, so I wouldn’t recommend relying on it…)

Five months on, we’re in slow connection land. While East and Southern Africa got a brand new high speed cable last week, completely revolutionising internet access for some of the continent, most of West and Central Africa plods on.

For us, this has meant spending more and more time in internet cafes. Uploading audio files and backing up the website often took several failed attempts of several hours each, and the WordPress back end can be achingly slow, with plenty of timeouts. As a result, we’ve been spending far more time in stuffy rooms in towns and less time on the bikes, with the sound recorder and wild camping than we’d have liked.

A few nights ago, we were sitting around on a terrace with a Senegalese friend who runs the hostel we’re staying in. We mentioned our website. Out came his laptop, his phone was plugged in and there we were, immediately connected at 460 kb/s (faster in practice than the speeds we were getting from our 3 mobile broadband dongle on our boat in London). Bliss.

The network provider was called Chinguitel and, the next day, we went to the local Chinguitel office to find out more. The network uses CDMA (a 3G technology which, embarrassingly, neither of us had heard of before) and, with a CDMA enabled phone, you can connect from “anywhere” in Mauritania and Senegal at varying but still decent speeds.

A bit more research suggested that CDMA coverage in Africa is pretty good and mobile broadband coverage looks set to explode – although there’s a battle going on over what shape it will take. Buying credit – in Mauritania at least – is cheaper than using internet cafes and some back-of-the-envelope scribbles reassured us that we’d recoup the money spent (decisively, if we took into account the extra time spent in towns to use internet) as well as hugely improve our quality of life. So, being lucky enough to be able to afford it, we shelled out the 100 Euros for an LG phone and Chinguitel SIM, and here I am, posting this from the hostel’s terrace, without holding my breath to see whether the page will publish or not. (For info, we bought the phone from the Chinguitel office on Nouadhibou’s main street in the Centre Ville.)

Mauritania and Senegal have a reciprocal arrangement, meaning we can use this SIM card and credit throughout Senegal. After Senegal (which we don’t have to think about for at least a couple of months, at the pace we’re travelling), we’ll need to buy new SIM cards for every African country that has CDMA coverage (unless anyone knows of a pan-ECOWAS or pan-African deal we haven’t been able to find?). We’ll probably not bother in smaller countries where we’ll be spending less time but this should be invaluable for us in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo where we’ll be spending a lot of time in very remote places.

All we need now is to get our little netbook charging off our solar panel and we’ll be completely self-sufficient for internet and electricity (we’re working on it!). Oh, and a support vehicle for all our gadgets…

We’re posting this – and future updates on the subject – for the benefit of other Africa travellers who, like us, may not be aware of the extent of mobile broadband in Africa. Obviously though, the real importance of the technology (coverage and cost allowing) lies in the potential it has for the many, many Africans who have no access to fixed lines – for more information on which I recommend reading one of the many fine commentators on all things mobile and Africa.