[tlug] Kind of OT, Oku no Hosomichi

[Jonathan Q <jq@example.com>]

I just got back from a week's business trip to Minh Quang
Village in Tuyen Quang Province, about 250 - 300 km northwest
of  Hanoi, working as a consulting network engineer on the Asia Frontier
Satellite project.

AFS is a Japanese-ODA-Funded feasibility study on
bringing Internet (and now VoIP services) to rural communities
with little/no Internet access or telephone systems, being done with VNPT.

In this phase of the project, some wireless WAN routers were installed
between three points in Minh Quang (Post Office, People's Committee
Office, and the High School), and also some IP Phones and a couple of PCs.
That's what I was there for.

No Linux involvement, at least not yet. However, since the Internet uplink
is small, perhaps a combo Squid box/caching nameserver can be negotiated
somewhere in the future.  We'll see :-)

Phone lines are scarce there; the IP phone we put in at the high school is their
only telephone.

All in all an interesting trip to a beautiful area that not many foreigners
(and maybe not many VNese, either) see.  The road is long, 
bumpy, dusty, unpaved, and over mountains, about 250 - 300 km
from Hanoi.  It was a tough week, coffee was scarce, and the rural guesthouse
and restaurant (both an hour's drive from the work site) were, well, not great,
to be charitable, but it was a pretty good experience.  People were so curious
and surprised at my presence that I wonder if I might be the first westerner to
go there since the French were driven out.   I've no way to find out, but it could
be possible.  It's far off the beaten track, and the reason we stayed one hour from 
the work site is that it was the closest lodging.  Even that place, a town called
Chiem Hoa, is pretty far off the beaten track. 

Water buffalo are more common on the road than motor vehicles in Minh Quang, 
and the air and water are really clean.  Fireflies are everywhere, every night.
That was the real highlight, plus of course, getting my hands on a Cisco for
the first time in quite a while :-)

The satellite building is quite nice, if small.  Carrier-grade UPS, dual auto-start
diesel generators backing it up.  We got to test those when the power went
out (common) while were in the satellite building.  Good equipment racks.
Overhead carriers for all network cabling. And all around the building,
free-rangechickens hunt for food beneath banana trees covered with fruit.
Makes for an interesting contrast :-)

J
-- 
Jonathan Q
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