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Around the World at Eighty Megahertz: The State of Internet Access Outside the U.S.By Tom GellerBe sure to see related sidebars on:In 1991, I went to The Netherlands to work for the World Esperanto Association, an organization which serves the world's speakers of the international language. As you might imagine, the group's members are a pretty wide-spread bunch: about 40,000 people in over 105 countries, with high concentrations in Eastern Europe and China. My job was to produce printed materials, help out with mass mailings and enliven the office with my charm and wit at the twice-daily coffee breaks. It was a good job: I slept in the attic, set my own hours, took part in the student orchestra at the local university and watched a lot of T.V. at two in the morning (mostly Dutch-subtitled episodes of "M*A*S*H* and "Happy Days"). And I tried -- oh, how I tried! -- to get Internet services for the office. In the U.S. of 1995, with unlimited e-mail via AOL and Internet service providers in every city of more than 20,000 people, it's hard to imagine how tough it was to get something so uncomplicated as e-mail. But in The Netherlands of 1991, here were my options for sending an electronic message:
Battling Phone Lines and BureaucracyFour years later, he's clearly been proven wrong. Not only are people using the Internet in The Netherlands, but also in Taiwan, Brazil, South Africa, New Zealand, India and Russia. Al Gore is not alone in trumpeting the benefits of the worldwide matrix: national governments around the world are setting aside funds, buying equipment and upgrading their phone lines in an effort to entice investors to establish Internet services in their borders. But the process is slow, and Internet wannabes overseas must still overcome a significant obstacle: aging phone lines. Scott Love, an American who lived in Japan between 1989 and 1992, remembers how difficult it was to connect. "[The problem was] the Japanese phone lines. They're all pulse dial, and they tend to be of poor quality, so you get a lot of static noise interfering with what you're trying to do with a modem. [In 1992, you'd be] lucky if you can get connected once every four times. Over the last year, it's gotten a lot better: now, [you'll get a connection] more like once every other time, and lose [it] once an hour. Just because you have a phone in your wall doesn't mean it's something your modem will be able to make heads or tails out of."
Treasures from overseasBut despite bad phone lines, sparse support and other obstacles, folks in other countries are making it onto the Internet and, in many cases, they're contributing tremendously to its quality. Take the case of Australians Peter N Lewis and Quinn "The Eskimo!". (Yes, those really are their names.) Together, they're responsible for a wide range of important Mac-based Internet programs, including Anarchie, Internet Config and FTPd (which is used by, among thousands of others, The Net's online arm, The Nest). All of their programs are available at http://redback.cs.uwa.edu.au/. In addition to tools, some of the hottest content in the form of World-Wide Web and FTP sites are developed and located overseas. For a sample, try the WebMuseum site (developed by Nicolas Pioch in Paris) mirrored in the U.S. at http://sunsite.unc.edu/wm/ and a superb guide to Japan (including language lessons!) found at http://www.ntt.jp/japan. In some cases, overseas developers and writers deliver goods that can't be had in the U.S., either because of location or cultural/legal reasons. The best example of this is in Finland, where an anonymous posting service exists; while American legislators debate about limiting Internet access and identifying users, identity remains fluid to anyone who uses the service, located at penet.fi. (For more information, write to help@anon.penet.fi.) In addition, a quick tour of International Relay Chat (IRC) rooms and Usenet newsgroups with an international focus (such as alt.current-events.bosnia) show that a lot of the news therein is from the country itself -- what better source could there be? On a personal note, I remember chatting via IRC with someone in Israel during one of that region's many conflicts: she described the sounds of bombing as they approached, and had to leave the chat room suddenly in order to grab her gas mask and evacuate the building. The news doesn't get more poignant than that. Sometimes, though, bad phone lines are the least of your problems. I first met Orlando Raola when he visited the United States from Cuba in 1992: he was an Esperanto speaker, and had arranged to stay in my house while in the country, ostensibly on official Esperanto business. A year later, I got an e-mail from him: he was well, thank you, and letting me know that I could contact him via e-mail. Some time later, I started acting as a link between him and his contacts in America: they would call me up with messages, which I would send to him via e-mail, and he would send me messages to get to them by phone. At one point, we managed to get some critical medicine to his family by means of this convoluted system. If we had relied on any other means of communication, it would never have gotten there. Only recently did I hear the incredible story of how he got that Internet e-mail account -- and how important it was for his survival.
A Lifeline for the Isolated"The phone system was collapsing: it had been installed by an American company at the beginning of the century. [For long-distance calls,] the telephone offices were few and far between and there were long, long lines. Sometimes you would be in line for two to three days. "Snail mail" letters could take 3-6 months to get somewhere outside the country, and a lot of correspondence was lost. Cable services like Western Union and ITA had been down for years. It was hard, it was hard. "We first got to know about the Internet through an article in the magazine 'Esperanto.' I started trying to find out where we could get Internet access -- nobody knew, nobody could tell us. Finally, I got a lead to an American in Cuba. She's a communist journalist, from San Francisco -- of course! -- and she was in Cuba mainly to report on the Castro regime. Every night [partners in Canada] would make a long-distance call to the Young Communist League's computer in Havana, and messages would go both ways, up until a certain time limit. At the same time, the Academy of Science began operating a link. So each day, there were two phone calls, one for the Science Academy, and one for the Young Communist League. I hooked up with both places. "Besides technical difficulties, there was the fear of censorship. By the time I decided to emigrate from Cuba, it was in October of 1993. I started to make contacts with Esperantists throughout the world: I did everything by e-mail, and the letters were very explicit. I was sending my resume, information about my family and myself. When I asked for permission to leave in 1994, I was scared, because I thought [these letters] might come out." He laughed, noting how e-mail helped him where all other forms of communication were impossible. "Always a risk.. but I had no choice."
W(WB)WW: The World-Without-Borders-Wide WebMany countries, fortunately, have advanced beyond Cuba's rudimentary e-mail system. The most noticeable growth has been in the World-Wide Web: there are now servers in more than 60 countries displaying web pages, with more being added every month. The Web has sprung up in places that never would have dreamed of Internet services five years ago, largely because it appeared so late in the Internet's history -- in 1993, 24 years after the first ARPAnet connection between Stanford and U.C.L.A. -- and has therefore had consistent standards right from the start. Web sites work pretty much the same way everywhere in the world, and a site developer in Croatia has as much power to create as one in Silicon Valley. (The fact that the Web was born at a European site -- the European Center for Particle Physics in Switzerland -- doubtlessly also helped speed its acceptance overseas. For a history of European involvement in the Web's genesis, visit http://www.cern.ch/) Another advantage of the Web's late development is that it's been well-catalogued from the start. The WWW registry kept by the World-Wide Web Consortium at http://www.w3.org/hypertext/DataSources/WWW/Servers.html lists thousands of servers containing Web pages, usually with clickable maps which allow you to zoom in on any part of the world. So let's say that you want to find a medical school in China: select the map of Northeastern Asia, click on China and follow the link to the China Home Page (http://www.ihep.ac.cn/china.html or http://solar.rtd.utk.edu/~china/china.html). There, you'll find a list of several dozen Chinese universities, many of which have medical schools. Alternately, you could simply search for the phrase "Chinese Medical University" in your favorite search engine (such as WebCrawler, at http://webcrawler.cs.washington.edu/WebCrawler/WebQuery.html) and you'd find the Chinese Universities page maintained by Jianhui Xia at http://tswww.cc.emory.edu/~jxia/8614/overseas.html. This search outlines the elegance of the World-Wide Web: resources are all treated the same, no matter where they're physically located. So when WebCrawler goes out to catalog the world's riches, it grabs a page from Bermuda as readily as it does a page from New York City. True, there are often differences in speed, as less-industrial countries don't have access to the faster computers we enjoy in the U.S.A. For the most part, though, the only way to tell where a page is physically located is to look at the two or three letters just before the third "/" in the page's address. (For more information on domain names and geographic locations, see the sidebar "Where in the World.")
So we can see them. Can they see us?When you take a quick survey of "foreign" web sites, you'll notice that many of them are actually located on servers in the good ol' U.S. of A. That's because getting online -- while infinitely easier than it was for me four years ago -- is still a tricky process. That's not to say that The U.S. has been alone in developing electronic communications: on the contrary, limited networks were up and running in France, Germany and England by the mid-70's. Networking overseas didn't get started in earnest until the mid-80's, though, when two important developments arose: first, Tom Jenning's FidoNet became popular on amateur bulletin boards; and second, the various networks which would eventually join together to form the Internet started reaching overseas. But FidoNet -- despite having approximately 20,000 nodes and hundreds of thousands of users -- is still not well linked to the Internet, and other overseas networks have historically been closed off to the general public. But that's changing. While FidoNet remains isolated, commercial Internet service providers are popping up all over the world, most notably in Europe, Asia and South America. Whether you're in the U.S. or overseas, several online guides will help you find those providers. First the Celestin Company's "Providers of Commercial Internet Access" list at http://www2.celestin.com/pocia/, which covers both domestic and non-U.S. sites. And from Europe itself, Benoit Lips' list at http://www.best.be/iap.html gives details only on providers outside of The States (although as of this writing, he's working on a list of U.S. providers). If all you want is e-mail and other basic Internet access services (file transfers via FTP, newsgroups, World-Wide Web browsing), the large commercial services offer increasingly diverse options. In general, though, they have been slow to realize that yes, Virginia, there are computer users in other countries who will pay good cash money to get online. When I spoke in late 1993 to Steve Case, President of America Online, his comments reflected the general feeling of the industry: that their goals are to develop services in North America first and that overseas access is of secondary importance. Not to people overseas, it isn't. Now that they're discovering the benefits of electronic communications en masse, they demand the same things from online services as Americans get:
The Americans AbroadIn all three of these areas, CompuServe remains the clear leader, with access available overseas for as long as America Online has been in existence -- since 1989. CompuServe spokesperson Debra Young believes that their primary advantage has been that they've built their own phone network, unburdening themselves from reliance on the networks owned by Sprint and British Telecom that most other international online services use. Because of this independence, CompuServe can now boast 1.2 million paying members outside of the United States. (Since my 1991 stay in the Netherlands, they've added a node in Amsterdam and lowered their prices considerably.) For members overseas, CompuServe has other advantages, too. Earlier this year, it opened its PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol) service, effectively creating a full-access Internet provider wherever there is a CompuServe dial-in point (see map). That means that members can use whatever Internet software they like -- Netscape, Eudora, Fetch, Trumpet News, or whatever -- to get information from anywhere. (See Chris Oakes' article, "Using CompuServe as an Internet Provider" in the August issue of The Net for complete instructions on how to set up your connection.) Finally, CompuServe speaks in tongues. If you post a message in English in the World Community Forum (Go: WCF), it will automatically get translated into Spanish, German and French and copied into language-specific forums. Messages posted in any of those three languages get translated into English -- well, into a sort of English. The German reads like the Katzenjammer Kids and the French smells of Maurice Chevalier, but in the words of the forum managers, the translations are "..awkward, but in most cases understandable." For example, "Bei uns ist nun der Sommer gekommen. Es ist sehr warm und ich gehe oft Baden" becomes "Here now the summer came. It is go very warm and I often bathing." CompuServe's chief competitor, America Online, has made its first tentative steps into delivering international service by teaming up with the German news company, Bertelsmann. They will be relying on Bertelsmann to provide content that's relevant to Europeans, although their view of a German-centric Europe is likely to offend many there. Both AOL and Apple's online service eWorld have been available throughout the world since last year via phone networks such as SprintNet and British Telecom, although only eWorld has actively solicited business outside North America. Of the two, eWorld is clearer about billing itself as a "worldwide" service: whereas they have a straightforward pricing plan for non-U.S. members ($9.95/month, includes one hour, plus $9.95/hour), America Online's prices vary depending on location, with surcharges up to $12/hour on top of their American prices. Speaking with representatives from both companies makes it clear that eWorld is more interested in the international market -- or, at least, the Asian market. Whereas eWorld's International Manager Craig Elliott said "We will actively market in Japan as soon as we get the Japanese client out," AOL spokesperson Pam McGraw flatly stated "We don't have any specific focus going on in Japan." The most intriguing online solution in Japan comes, appropriately, from Japan itself. Franky Online is a service which uses a CD-ROM as the entranceway to a highly graphical, "virtual reality"-like imaginary world. It looks like the popular CD-ROMs Doom and Freak Show, but Franky Online is no game: if you buy a toy at the "Santa Claus Machine" or pick up a video at the "Stone Heads" store, your credit card will be billed -- and you'll really receive the product in the mail. In addition, it offers various Internet services such as e-mail and a direct IP connection, at an additional cost of 10 yen per minute (about $7/hour), and includes two free hours in the 500 yen/month membership fee. (Additional hours are 10 yen/minute, meaning that using Franky Online to access the Internet costs a total of $14/hour in connect charges.) In addition to being able to "see" the Internet, members will be able to let the Internet "see" them through their own home pages. While the service is limited to Tokyo right now, spokesperson Rumi Ishikawa reports that the company is planning to establish dial-in access points in Osaka and Nagoya within months. Information about Franky Online and other services from its parent company, "Future Pirates," can be found at the WWW site http://www.fpi.co.jp/Welcome.html. While these commercial services are the only ones online at the time that I'm writing this, others are scrambling to get a slice of the potentially lucrative overseas pie. As sure as money's to be made, you can bet Microsoft will be there: Microsoft Network will be among those with their plates out, and Europe Online has been waiting for AT? to perfect its Interchange software before making its move. All of these services add up to one thing for computer users outside the U.S.: more access.
Communications and CommunityThe fact that Internet access is becoming more and more universal is good news for everybody. For the language organization in The Netherlands, looking to inform its members; for the young man overseas, keeping in touch with developments at home; or for isolated intelligentsia the world over, online communications continue the work of churches and common-interest groups: they give us community. Orlando and I met to talk about this article in a cafe in San Francisco a few weeks ago. We see each other frequently now: sometimes for tea, sometimes to talk about computers, sometimes just to be around one another. His voice remains the same as the one I came to know when we talked across the barriers thrown up by our respective homelands. After he had told me his story -- it was obviously painful for him -- he put down his tea and wrinkled his brow for a moment. Eventually he summed up the source of his pain, a fount with a rivers flowing through each cloistered soul. He said: "I feel that communication is much like the air you breathe. You don't realize that you breathe the air all the time -- but you couldn't live without it. You don't realize the power you have, being able to communicate. It might not be easy for you to understand if you have always been immersed in this communication paradise; you hardly could imagine what it means to be without it."
This page was last updated on Monday, February 09, 2004 at 3:07pm CST. All contents copyright 2005 by Tom Geller.
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