Friday, March 07, 2003

If you're high, you can log on This story has been around for a while but apparently it's closer to fruition. A descendant of one of the Sherpas accompanying Sir Edmund Hillary on the first conquest of Mt. Everest in 1953, Tsering Gyalzen, is setting up an Internet cafe at the mountain's base camp. The cafe will use solar cells, laptops and rechargeable batteries because base camp has no electrical power. To relay the Internet data, Gyalzen is building a second hut in the Kalapathar area, about a two-hour trek below the base camp, for satellite equipment that will transmit signals through radio links to the Internet cafe. Although the base camp cafe will be challenging to construct, obstacles are nothing new for Gyalzen. He already operates an Internet cafe at the 11,280-foot-high Namche village, also on the Everest trekking route. Using satellite links to the capital, Katmandu, he provides access to foreign trekkers and local people. But the real problems were unrelated to the village's altitude. A year after Namche's only telephone facility in the area was destroyed by Nepalese Maoist insurgents, Gyalzen set up a 48-line telephone exchange, with lines enabling people in and around the village to communicate with each other. However, the government has not allowed him to link his exchange to other parts of the country, so Gyalzen's Internet cafe is now the chief mode of communication between Namche and the rest of the world. Ah, the beauty of wireless communication. 9:29:51 AM    Oh yeah? []