Rollback on “cyber-island”.

I was hanging around Digg this morning and came across this (really) old article concerning Mauritius and the term cyber-island. This will clear a lot of inconsistancies on the term used.

As you can see, this Digg article was published some 3 years ago. This was the original idea: setting wireless over the whole country. Today this isn’t the case and political and entrepreneurial coalitions have turned this whole project into a mess.

On the GT website, the 2006 article related to this Digg stated the following:

“It is our vision to transform Mauritius into a cyber-island,” said Deelchand Jeeha, the country’s minister of information technology and telecommunications, in a speech last year. The nation, he said, “is confident in the potential of (the industry) as an engine of growth which can generate jobs and wealth creation.”

Seems that wealth creation has been done only for some categories of providers. For the rest of it, the ISP adventure has been a real ordeal but what is clear is that the ordeal numerous Mauritians are going through just to have access to the Internet is worse than that if time, money and stress are added up. Vanesha Bijou’s article on le Defi (yes, there are some *extremely rare* good posts there) sums it all. What strikes me is that telephone based ADSL is a mammoth sized problem that cannot be tackled. What about the real cyber-island objective then? Has it gone down the drain? Where are all these promises?

In France there are free open wireless access spaces around nearly every city and this is a local service. Set these up side by side and you get enough to cover all Madagascar in wireless and in Mauritius it seems to be impossible. Avinash Meetoo stated the outcomes and problems of this whole business as well as the misunderstanding of the underlying projects (especially that of Cyber City which should have been the heart of the project) some two years ago. True enough that there are many drawbacks but I think that the major problem in this project is the way the project has been driven and the lack of interest and incentive the government has for it. The cyber-island coinage was too good to be true.

Along with that Mauritius does not give incentives for young engineers to come back with their enhanced talents. Blame it on politics, social privileges, corruption etc. I know one of the guys who worked on the extension of the optical fibre to Mauritius who has now emigrated to the UK because the board at MT just gave his “promised” team management seat to an elder on the very basis that the person was an elder.

I fully agree with Avinash’s arguments set forward at that time and this article is part of an answer to his question and statement: “Can we still succeed? I have some doubts.” Cyber Island project was an aim and miss. It all ended up with Mauritians crying for better connectivity over their landline ADSL.