Networking
Egypt is a poor country, make no mistake about it. The average wage here is about 1000 Egyptian pounds a month, or $200US. Much of the life is scaled accordingly; with a hamburger costing 20 cents and so on, which makes it absolutely amazing for vacationing, but some things cost the same as they do in Canada. Sometimes there are things that are even more expensive. When I was here 5 years ago, the cost of a computer was about thrice that in Canada, factor in the difference in income, and only the absolute richest of the rich were able to afford one. 5 years later the prices have become far more reasonable and affordable, so now upper middle class families can have their own personal computers.
Then comes the issue of the Internet.
First, a little background. In Egypt, because of the low income levels, people have taken very novel ways to spread and share what they're given. Pretty much everything is shared, reused and recycled here. A lot of the pop drinks are consumed out of glass bottles that are cleaned and reused over and over again, just like we used to do many years ago. The other really neat aspect of the sharing comes with the public transportation. Very few people can afford their own cars here, so the public transportation system is incredibly active and vibrant. In most Western cities there are three types of intra-city public transit: subway/trams, buses, taxis. Alexandria has those three but expanded and mishmahsed together. There are various levels of buses that travel around the city all catering to different income levels. There's the expensive and fancy bus that has curtains on the windows and air conditioning, then the medium level that forgoes the air condition but still offers comfortable seats, and then there's the lowest level which costs almost nothing and provides only the most functional of transportation needs. As for taxis, there's really only one level and they're everywhere, maybe not as common as in a city like New York city, but comparable to most major metropolitan centers I'd imagine.
Now, there's a class of transportation that is completely unique to this area. I don't know in how many other countries this kind of transit exists, it could really just be western countries that don't have these things, since my experience is limited, anyway, they're great! They're kind of a mix between a taxi and a bus, with the mode of transport being those old 60s scooby doo vans. I think they're considered closer to a bus as they have predetermined routes, but the routes are more flexible and they'll stop anywhere to pick people up or drop them off. The other really cool thing about the system here is how people pay. Obviously these vans aren't going to have some kind of ticketing system or automatic payment system or anything like that, even the real buses don't. And the pace of life is far too hectic to have to wait for people entering the vehicle to take out the money and pay. Instead the system works much like baseball vendors. You go and sit down as the bus takes off, and then pay while travelling, you just hand the money to the person in front of you, and eventually the money will make its way to the driver. Trust plays a very big role in all of this, and it all just works.
Ok, that wasn't really a little background, but whatever. So now looking at this concept of sharing, the Internet is the same thing. Internet cafes are very plentiful, and now with affordable home pcs people are getting the Internet to their homes. But instead of getting a line directly to their house from the ISP, they instead rent bandwidth from a net cafe that runs an ethernet cord to the apartment. What happens is that you get dozens of computers all networked together. While this provides quite a bit of inconvenience as most lines are in the 1-2Mbit level, so sharing this much produces quite a hit on the bandwidth, there's a cool effect that comes about from a LAN. As anybody that has lived in a dorm before, 100Mbp LAN connections are quite powerful. What I'm trying to get people here to do is start running some kind of LAN sharing software so they can all share the media they download without having to go to the outside (read: slow) Internet. Instead of everybody downloading the latest BSB album, only one person has to, and then it just spreads across the network in a few minutes. If the people here could setup something like UWGo (people from Western University will know what I'm talking about) they'd be way ahead of many western countries. I know some cities in Eastern Europe have set up a similar system and it works quite well for them. Anyway, fortunately for the citizens here, the very high population density makes rolling out network infrastructure a very efficient process. I imagine that within 5 years time the network here will be more advanced than that in the US and Canada.
