I’m very excited, and honored to be recognized in this way. I’d also like to take this to time to say, “If you need Ushahidi work, give me a call.”

Thanks,

John.

Lonestar Cell:

Data Service on your phone:

Access Point Name: internetlcc
Everything else: leave blank

You can also dial *353*4# to check your data subscription status and *353*0# to terminate your subscription. Lonestar is also selling USB EDGE Modems for your computer for $40.00.

Fixed Wireless

Lonestar offers the following as part of their iConnect WiMax network, which is only available in Monrovia:

Note that it’s not specified how the bandwidth is split upstream/downstream.

Lonestar sells the following devices that you would have to buy to use the iConnect service:

• USB Dongle – $99.00
• Tower Max – A stationary receiver, as I recall it can operate at higher speeds than the USB dongle – $159.00
• WiFi Max – Same as Tower Max but with a built in WiFi access point – $199.00

All of this information was gathered from handouts and fliers at the Lonestar office and talking with Lonestar staff.

Also of note, Lonestar has Liberia’s first mobile money system. Check it out here: http://www.lonestarcell.com/download/Mobile_Money_User_Guide.pdf. For more on Mobile Money you can read a blog post from one of my Liberian colleagues. I also asked Lonestar for a list of the places they had cell towers. I thought this was a reasonable request. Like what if you’re stuck on the road from Fishtown to Harper and need to know which direction to walk in to get a signal. At first they thought I wanted lat,lon coordinates and they acted like this was a big deal, such information seemed super sensitive to them, as though with this knowledge I could bring down their network. Which all seemed rather silly to me. They said they’d send me a list of the towns the towers were in, but never did. I found this on their website which, more or less, answered my question: http://www.lonestarcell.com/page.php?pid=4. According to that page they have 77 villages and cities covered, cover approximately 82% of the Liberian population. They’re list of villages/cities covered is: Careysburg, Brewerville, Kakata, Harbel, Salala, Weala, Gbarnga, Suacoco, Gbatala, Totota, Palala, Bong Mines, Botota, Gold Camp, Ganta, Bahn, Kample, Kissipli, Kpen, Yekepa, Zuwuloo, Sanniquellie, Saclopea, Loguatuo, Tappita, Zwedru, Buchanan and Buchanan LAC, Voinjama, Foyah, Zorzor, Kolahun, Greenville, Yenwhen, Tubmanburg, Robertsport, Medina, Gbah, Sinje, Bo Water Side, Lofa Bridge, Sinoe, Harper, Pleebo, Zweinta, Karweaken Salaye, Vahun, Cesstos, Pleebo, Harper, Fish Town. You might have noticed that they only list 55 places here, and some of them are kind of the same, like listing “Sinoe” and “Greenville”, so I can only assume that this list is not comprehensive of all 77 locations they have.

Cellcom:

Data Service on your phone:

Access Point Name: web.cellcomnet.net
Everything else: leave blank

When I was at Cellcom they were running a deal where you would get a EDGE USB modem, that the flier said, “3G+ ready”, presumably indicating the modem could handle 3G if the network were also 3G, and one months worth of data for $49.00. The flier also said you get a “20% discount on all data packages”, so that’s nice.

I know the limits Cellcom enforces have caused problems for my friends who use the USB Modems for internet on their computers, but if you’re just checking email on your phone, maybe looking at a map or two, and looking at basic, websites, you should be able to stay under them.

Fixed Wireless

Cellcom offers the following as part of their fixed wireless network, which is only available in Monrovia:

Just like Lonestar, Cellcom does not specified how the bandwidth is split upstream/downstream.

Cellcom charges $390.00 to setup and install their fixed wireless service at your location.

All of this information was gathered from handouts and fliers at the Cellcom office and talking with Cellcom staff.

I also asked Cellcom staff for a list of the places they had cell towers, and they reacted just like Lonestar, first acting like that was a major security breach and then promising to send me something and never doing it. I looked over their website for a listing of places covered and couldn’t find anything.

Things to Keep in Mind

With lower costs and no usage limits it would seem that Lonestar is the clear winner here. However, as anyone who’s lived in Liberia knows, the real issue is reliability. How many hours and days of the month will your service be down, how often will it be so slow that it’s unusable? On this trip I didn’t have time to perform any tests to determine these factors.

Later,

You can find the post here: http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2011/09/14/sms-and-liberia-a-love-story/

iLab Liberia, a project of the Ushahidi Liberia team, has been bustling since it opened this May.  iLab has become Liberia’s go-to resource center for local IT professionals, a training ground in open source software and has been known to throw a pretty mean mapping party.

We’ve told you a bit about iLab on this blog before, but now we have a visual aid to better introduce ourselves.  We started the space as a way to train people in the Ushahidi platform with adequate connectivity and equipment, and now we’re holding FOSS trainings for the Liberian legislature and serving as the data entry hub for national Elections Coordinating Committee. So many good and unexpected things start with a tool that serves to connect, and to ask people – what is your story?  Now we are asking, who is your community? And we get to be part of the answer.  It’s an exciting time to be in Liberia – with a presidential election next month, broadband Internet   landing offshore in 2012 and increasing overlaps between Liberia’s  development and tech communities.  We hope you’ll take a look at our video to learn more about what iLab is doing to promote IT access and innovation in Liberia.

The map that you see here is made by the Admin Map plugin that I wrote. You can download the Admin Map plugin here. Obviously I’m biased, but I don’t think an Ushahidi instance should leave the repository with out it. In addition to this nifty, tiny, embeddable map, you can also get this sweet, huge, full screen map. If that’s not enough you also get a really cool map on the back end that lets the admins see all the private reports and stuff too, but of course, I can’t show you that.

The map data comes from Liberia 2011, the Ushahidi map for monitoring the 2011 elections in Liberia that I have the honor and privilege of working on.

Later.

Google and Ushahidi will be co hosting a 1 day workshop/conference on technology and its possible uses in the upcoming elections. It’ll have a focus on how technology has worked in the elections of other countries to help give the citizens a voice, ways technology can be used to ensure transparency, and a few more technical topics, like using Google’s free code hosting service, App Engine. I’ll be speaking along with some people from Google and Ushahidi. The details are:

Date: Friday, June 24th
When: 9am – 5pm
Where: PA’s Rib House
Who: Open to everyone, but you must register online
Cost: FREE

To register, and for more info, go to: https://sites.google.com/site/techelection/. We only have room for 150 people so sign up soon.

Then I left the US to work in Liberia. In Liberia computer parts were over priced, and not always of reliable quality. Plus, who wants to spend a lot of money on a fancy computer just to have the generator run high and blow it all out.

So finally, upon returning to the US, and letting my savings build up after the wedding, I bought myself a pretty sweet computer setup. Basically what we have is a home built computer composed of the following parts:

• CPU - Intel Ci7 950
• Motherboard – GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD3R ATX 1366
• RAM – 24GB of Corsair D3 1600 DIMM
• Hard Drives - 2 Seagate 1TB 3.5″ SATA 7200rpm
• Graphics Card - GIGABYTE ATI Radeon HD5770 1 GB DDR5 2DVI/ HDMI
• Case – Thermalta Dokker ATX case
• Power Supply – Thermalta TR2 RX750W PSU ATX12
• Monitors – 3 23.6″ ASUS VE247H LED LCDs

So yeah, I blew straight past 2 monitors and went with 3.

I’m running Ubuntu 11.04 64 bit. So far it’s been pretty good. This is my first attempt at running Linux as my primary OS. I’ve run Ubuntu 9 for a long time on an old laptop, but now I’m trusting Linux with my livelihood. That’s me building the beast on the left.

I was super happy that Ubuntu recognized my wireless card (I didn’t feel like running 100 feet of cat5 from the router to my computer) a Linksys WMP600n with out any special drivers. It just worked, like it should. I was also very happy that getting the desktop to span all three screen was a piece of cake. Again, no fancy drivers. I’m not sure if I’m getting all the accelerated 3Dness out of the video card, but I don’t care. I bought it to be productive, not to play games. I did have to buy a DisplayPort to DVI adapter cable to run my 3rd monitor.

I have had some programs randomly close, and a hard disk crashed the first time I tried putting the computer to sleep, more about that below. Most programs are pretty easy to install, but some are a bit tricky, and wouldn’t be something I’d recommend for the non-technical. It’s not as user friendly as Windows, but pretty close.

I been really impressed with how Linux just works with all my hardware. My wife’s old HP Officejet 4315 works, the Samsung DVD-RW works, no installing extra crap. That’s been nice. No downloading drivers.

So far one of the Seagate hard drives crashed. That sucked. It was noisier than I thought a hard drive should be when I first installed it, so it was probably bad from the factory. I had to reinstall all my programs and reconfigure them. I’ve been using Dropbox to back-up all my data, so that was no biggie. Though it takes Dropbox like 40 hours to resync everything. I bought everything from Micro Center and they were super cool with me returning the bad disk. No worries there. I also bought the 2 year service plan. I don’t normally do that, but since I’ll use this computer to make my living, I’d rather just take it to someone and tell them to fix it than waste a lot of my time figuring it out.

I also bought, for the first time ever paid money for, a copy of Windows. I now own Windows 7 64-bit. I run it in a Oracle Virtual Box 4.0.6 virtual machine. This is also my first time experimenting with virtualization. So far it’s been great. With 24GB of RAM, I’ve never had to worry about running out of memory while running another OS and all my favorite programs work fine, except Skype. Skype crashes every time I start it up in my VM Windows. I have no idea why.

I use my virtual Windows machine for checking that the web site stuff I make works on all Windows web browsers. It’s also handy to have a copy of Office around. LibreOffice is pretty good and does a lot, but MS Office is still pretty awesome. I also use the VM to stream movies from Netflix. Netflix uses Silverlight which hasn’t been ported to Linux.

And of course the computer is fast. So far I haven’t really had to wait for anything, ever. Even when running 30 plus programs and a copy of windows 7 everything is fast. I’ve only ever used up 13 GB of ram, leaving 11GB unused. And with three monitors I no longer used ALT+TAB, I just look to the left.

With three monitors I couldn’t keep using the old card table that my laptops used to sit on, so I went to Home Depot, my favorite furniture store, and bought $100 worth of wood to make a proper work bench. Here are some pictures of that as well.

I plan on looking into what it would take to have a RAID array. That one hard disk crashing wasted a lot of time and I’d like to not do that again. So I’ll probably wait a month or two and then look into getting a few more hard drives.

But that’ll be another day,

John.

I’ve been working for Ushahidi as their technical consultant in Liberia. It’s been fun and I enjoy the work. One of the many features of Ushahidi is that it’s made to work with FrontlineSMS. FrontlineSMS is a program that allows a computer to receive text messages via a cell phone or GSM modem. Once the computer has received the text message FrontlineSMS allows you to do a number of things with it, one of which is forwarding to a web site.

However, in Liberia the internet isn’t so hot, and often a text message will be received when the internet is not working. The problem is that FrontlineSMS still receives the text, but only tries once to forward it on to Ushahidi, and doesn’t know if the message was received or not.

So to overcome this problem I wrote a little Java program that looks into the FrontlineSMS database, finds new messages and then sends them on to Ushahidi. I then used the Windows Task Scheduler to run this java program every 5 minutes to ensure timely transmission. Some of you may wonder why I’m using Windows when everything else I’m using is open source. The simple answer is that many of the organizations we work with in Liberia only use Windows PCs, and so to ask them to switch to something else would be pretty disruptive.

So here’s a .zip file with the source, required libraries, executable .jar file, and a sample config file.

The frontlinesync.jar, h2-1.2.140.jar, and config.txt files need to be in the same directory for the program to work.

The config file specifies where the Frontline database file is, the URL to the Ushahidi instance, and the FrontlineSMS key to the Ushahidi instance. Also included is flsync.bat. This is a batch file that forces the java file to run minimized. Use this file with the Windows Task Scheduler to make the sync program run in the background at regular intervals. Here’s a tutorial on how to use Task Scheduler.

I’ve only been using this for 2 days, so I’m sure bugs will be discovered as time goes on. If you find any please let me know. If you want to see all of this in action check out Liberia Mapped, and try texting something in to +231-88-066-8932. Liberia Mapped is a simple directory of organizations in Liberia.

—————UPDATE—————-

I’ve had some issues with the executable .jar file not working properly when run from the task scheduler. I’m not really sure what causes it but it seems the class path breaks down some where. So I’ve updated the flsync.bat file to say:

java -cp frontlinesync.jar;h2-1.2.140.jar FrontLineSync

instead of just:

frontlinesync.jar

So a bit about methodology. Ideally I’d love to test one ISP for a week straight running quantitative tests like download speeds and measure up time. I’d like to look at how the ISP works at 2am vs, 2pm, as most providers seem to get really slow in the middle of the day. Because all ISPs in Liberia are Wireless ISPs (WISPs) I’d also love to test how a provider works in Congo Town verses Mamba Point, since location will effect signal strength and user density. Sadly, I don’t have the resources or time to do such an intensive test of each ISP. Mostly I’m borrowing friend’s USB modems when and where I can to conduct these tests.  Tests were designed to be quick so I could return the borrowed hardware in a reasonable amount of time.

With this in mind, please realize that this won’t be a super accurate view of how the ISPs perform on average. It’ll be more like a one time snapshot than an evaluation of how they perform all month long. And as we know from the recent Cellcom lightning outage, “anomalies” can bring down a whole system for an extended period of time.

So I decided to have 2 tests. I wanted to do another test, but that fell through, more on that later.

1. Large Download Test – A 1.9mb image file is downloaded and timed. The idea here is to see how quickly something can be downloaded that’s large enough to give the network time to get up to speed and stabilize. When a data stream starts up the network has to figure out the best way to route it, also TCP flow control and error checking also work best when a steady stream of data is present. The main goal of this test is to see what the bandwidth is, or how much data can be pushed through over time. The picture downloaded was the sunset from my trip to Harper.
2. Ping Test – Ping is a super simple network diagnostic tool used to check that a message can be sent to, and a reply received from, a device on a network. On my laptop I have ping setup to run all the time so I know when the internet drops out. Ping also tells you how long it took for the reply to be received. This allows us to test latency. Latency is the measure of delay in the network. From the moment you press enter, to the time the first bytes of a web page are received by your computer, that amount of time is measured as latency. Because all of Liberia is connected to the world through VSATs, the latency will never be below 500ms (milliseconds) or half a second. This is why you hear a delay when talking to your friends abroad. The VSAT signal has to go from Liberia, to space, and then back down to Earth, probably Lebanon, Israel, or the UK. Which means the signal travels 70,000km just to reach the internet. The speed of light is roughly 300,000km/sec, so that means that just to reach the internet there’s a delay of .25 seconds, or 250ms. Then the reply has to come back from the internet, which is another .25 seconds. So you get a total minimum delay of .5 seconds or 500ms. For way more info on this VSAT lag see this article.

I wanted to test how long it took to load a medium sized web page, around 100kb with images, CSS, java script and all. But the page that I thought was static that i used for my test somehow changed sizes between tests. So I had to throw that data out, which sucks, but that’s what you get in this age of dynamic content.

Also note that I use thousands of bits per second (kbps), when measure network speeds. This is different than thousands of bytes per second. Network speeds are usually measured in bits and files are usually measured in bytes. One bit is one “off” or “on” signal, one “1″, or “0″ where a byte is 8 bits. For example on a computer the letter ‘A’ is represented by these 8 bits “01000001.” Those 8 bits make up one byte.

So if you have a 128kbps internet connection and you want to download a file that is one megabyte, it’ll take (1,000,000 * 8 ) / 128,000 = 62.5 seconds to download. Not 1,000,000/128,000 = 7.8 seconds. So just keep that in mind. Also that math is over simplified because it doesn’t account for TCP/IP overhead and rounding in the measure of a megabyte, but it should get the point across about a byte vs a bit.

Comium

At my apartment we pay $150 a month for Comium’s 256kbps connection. Back in February Comium had a two for one deal that if you paid for 3 months of service you’d get twice the speed. So we should really be paying $150 a month for 128kbps or $300 a month for 256kbps. But till July we’ve got 256kbps for only$37.50 per roommate. In this comparison Comium is used as a baseline. Unlike the other ISPs here which use cellular technologies, Comium uses a technology that’s closer to super long range Wi-Fi or Wi-Max. You also have to pay $350 for a special modem that plugs in the wall and makes Comium a stationary source of internet. All the other ISPs in this comparison use cellular technologies like GPRS or CDMA which allow you to take your internet wherever you go, and their modems are quite less costly. Also Comium is only available in Monrovia, where Lonestar and Cellcom will work wherever they have a tower, which is most of the population centers in the country.

I use this at home and it’s been pretty darn fast for Liberia. At night, when the rest of Monrovia sleeps, and isn’t  using the internet, I can almost stream Youtube videos. We have had some issues with the internet randomly dropping out. Usually it’s fixed by resetting the router, which makes me wonder if the problem is Comium or my router.

These numbers were tested between 6:44PM and 6:55PM from my secret lair in the heart of Mamba Point . Here are the numbers

Cellcom

Cellcom offers unlimited use of their cellular EDGE for $60 a month. You can use any EDGE device to access their service. This could include your EDGE cellphone or the USB EDGE modem Cellcom sells for $50. To get on the Cellcom EDGE data network set the following on your device:

Access Point Name (APN): web.cellcomnet.net
Dial Number *99#

Generally people I’ve talked to have had good things to say about Cellcom. They say it’s reliable and fast enough. Most people I talk to do say that Libtelco is faster. This is often attributed to the fact that Libtelco has far less customers and thus their internet connection is split between less people.

Cellcom’s data was collected between 6:05pm and 7:01pm on a roof top bar overlooking mamba point.

Lonestar

Lonestar also lets you have unlimited access of their cellular data network for $60 a month. You can also use it at the rate of $1 an hour. I use the later option all the time when I want to check email and I don’t have any other means. I can check my email in about a minute, and at a $1 that’s way cheaper than paying $60 a month. Lonestar will also sell you a USB modem for $50, or you can use your favorite mobile device instead. My ThinkPad laptop has a built in GSM modem, like a cellphone, the SIM card sits annoyingly right behind the battery, so I use Lonestar on my laptop, again because I don’t want to commit to $60 a month.

Another point of interest is that the Lonestar USB modem sold at the Lonestar office is just a Huawei EG162G modem with some Lonestar branding. Huawei E series GSM modems are supported by FrontlineSMS. So if you want to start using SMS in cool ways with your organization, just go to lonestar, get one of their modems and download FrontlineSMS.

To get Lonestar to work on your mobile device use these settings:

Access Point Name (APN): internetlcc

Lonestar was tested from my base of covert operations in Mamba Point between

I’m hoping to test a friends Libtelco USB modem soon. I also want to apologize for screwing up the web page test. I think having those results would be really helpful. And finally, I want to reiterate that these results are just a snap shot of the performance of each ISP, at a specific time and place. People have reported far different results at different times and places.

Special thanks to Nate and Elie for them letting me borrow their internet devices.