The Rogue King

The Rogue King http://rogueking.com Life. Design. Technology. Business Thu, 18 Feb 2010 09:30:46 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Life. Design. Technology. Business no The Advent of True Broadband in Uganda? No, Not yet. http://rogueking.com/technology/the-advent-of-true-broadband-in-uganda-not-yet http://rogueking.com/technology/the-advent-of-true-broadband-in-uganda-not-yet#comments Wed, 05 Aug 2009 05:00:37 +0000 Solomon King http://rogueking.com/?p=572 http://rogueking.com/technology/the-advent-of-true-broadband-in-uganda-not-yet/feed 27 On Thursday, 23rd July 2009, Seacom went “live”. For Ugandans, that was a momentous occasion in more ways than one. As one of the speakers put it, it heralded the beginning of “new beginnings”. I’ve been priviledged to be involved in the excitement to an extent, and I will do my best to recap. The Seacom Launch Event The event was more of a media launch, a demonstration of the capabilities of the Seacom fibre optic cable. I was invited to the event by Lowe Scanad’s PR department, through Mr Collin Asiimwe. My verdict? Honestly, I was blown away! For the first time ever, in Uganda, I was able view online video tutorials real time. We’re talking tutorials that are close to 700MB. Typically, I leave them downloading overnight(s) and watch them the next day, but this time, there was almost zero buffering of the videos. Mr Godfrey Ivudria of Business Week was seated next to me and he was watching CNN Live… well, live. Realtime. I was also getting simultaneous download speeds of close to 180KB/s (about 1.4mbps) while watching the video tutorial. To put that in context, my normal internet connection gives me download speeds of about 10 KB/s (about 81kpbs) at night, when the rest of the users are asleep! I wasn’t able to run some more stress tests due to time constraints, but needless to say, I was very impressed. I should have planned more and brought a whole batch of files to download! The highlight of the day though, was the live broadcast of the continental Seacom launch. It was held in Tanzania and presided over by the Tanzanian President, Jakaya Kikwete. Picture quality was excellent and the video stream was seamless, apart from one or two brief glitches. I was witnessing broadband at its truest. Truth be told, I was in the middle of what could only be described as maalo ( kinda like shameless-mouth-hanging-open-awe ). And it was justified. This was the first time I was seeing a live high quality video broadcast that was being streamed off the internet real time. I’m a techie to some extent, and I could appreciate the technological advancement we had just made, and my creative mind was trying to grapple the endless opportunities that this created for both content platform providers like myself and the end-users. After that we had a cocktail/meetup session and it was back to the grinding stone for me. That was the same night our very own <a title=\"Design Kingdom\" href="http://rogueking.com/wp-content/plugins/feed-statistics.php?url=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5kZXNpZ25raW5nb20udWc=" target=\"_blank\">Design Kingdom</a> went live. I was in office till about 4am. Got about 2 hours sleep before my alarm went off. The Sanyu FM Breakfast Show Bright and early the next day, 7AM, I was a guest on the Sanyu FM Breakfast Show. I won’t bore you with the details, you can simply listen to the recording below. Sound quality is a bit poor, but you should be able to makes out a few voices mumbling. The guests at the show were: John Mathwasa, Seacom Africa Project Manager; Micheal Niyitegeka, Head of Corporate Relations, FCIT, Makerere University and me. Here’s the audio: Or in case you cannot listen to it online, dowload it here: <a title=\"Sanyu FM Breakfast Show - Seacom Edition\" href="http://rogueking.com/wp-content/plugins/feed-statistics.php?url=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5yb2d1ZWtpbmcuY29tL3dwLWNvbnRlbnQvdXBsb2Fkcy9hdWRpby9TYW55dV9GTV9TZWFjb21fU2hvd19leHBvcnRfMy5tcDM=" [...] On Thursday, 23rd July 2009, Seacom went “live”. For Ugandans, that was a momentous occasion in more ways than one. As one of the speakers put it, it heralded the beginning of “new beginnings”. I’ve been priviledged to be involved in the [...]