Ladies and Gentlemen,

The year before last, we tried a sattelite modem, B-GAN, from our hunting camp in the Selous.

That experiment turned out to be a miserable failure.

Last year I called our friend Canuck, who posted reports on this forum for us.

This afternoon I had a visit with one of the representatives of Thuraya, and he brought along one of their new 144kb ADSL sattelire modems to try.

This one uses an athernet connection to the computer, with an assigned IP address.

It worked imediately, and we were able to brows the web without any problems at all.

We hope to take one of these modems with us, so we will be able to give you daily reports, with photos, of all Walter's misadventures.

Thuraya supplies sattelite phones as well. They have much better volice quality, and there is no lag time while talking. In fact, using Thuraya telephones is no different to using a cell phone.

Thuraya web site

My firm uses Thuraya on all of our project sites in Cameroon and Chad with good (not perfect though) results. One feature I do like is the capability of switching from a local provider to international satellite connection with just a push of the button. Eliminates the need for two phones.

Saeed, you are very correct about Thuraya, and they are the best that I have seen and have used. Just bought 8 new phones for our camps. Would be very interested in their internet connection as well.

are you really going to take walter around such a piece of hi tech equipment??

Walter just talks on it, Saeed does the dialing etc..Walter can almost handle that with a mix up now and then, but thats expected.

WOW! Thanks, this is so cool. At first glance looks like this can be used just about anywhere. Very cool. Thanks Saeed!

We have used Thurayas in the Interior of Oman for several years and they work when nothing else does. But the cellular coverage increases daily and we are slowly phasing them out. I have never used one for Data transmission, but they would a lot more compact than the V-SAT we drag around.

Frank