Jean Michel Billaut as announced came to Mauritius and delivered 3 full day seminars on the theme Future 2.0. He also gave a short presentation to the managers of the National Computer Board.
Jean Michel forecasts the slow death of our call center industries with the advent of Visio-technology coupled with the increased of the bandwidth of the internet due to be in place soon with the decision of the French Administrations to install ‘end to end’ fiber optics connections throughout the French territory.
I was so pleased to have held in my hand a proto-type version of iliad e-reader.
My partners of APM who contributed for Jean Michel’s trip to Mauritius, left the seminars happy to have learned so much about the future yet still hungry for more knowledge.
In the nutshell, without larger bandwidth,hi speed internet and without fiber optics connections the future of Mauritius would be gloomy.
Merci Jean Michel
http://billaut.typepad.com/jm/2007/02/ocean_indien_n1.html#comments
7 comments ↓
Pity that I wasn’t aware that a Future 2.0 guy was coming to Mauritius or else I would have come to the conference.
I have to admit that I don’t know anything about Jean-Michel Billaut but having had a look at his blog I can see he is a big fan of giving high bandwidths to everyone.
In a way this is already the case in Mauritius. Many of us (the MyT subscribers) have 2Mbit/s connections except that this is only for servers located in Mauritius. Now we only have to wait for MT to come up with a good plan to give Mauritians the possibility to deploy their content in servers located here at a price comparable with what we have elsewhere…
But this being still a distant dream, our future is, for the time being, still gloomy…
Unless you want to run enterprise level applications, can you not set up a box and use a dynamic dns service?
The dns will still point to a local IP address, thus providing local access bandwidth and latency. How is the upstream bandwidth?
2Mbits is hardly high bandwidth however. Over here in Toronto, we are stagnating at 6Mbits max and that is slow!
The foundations of the internet is about free and indiscriminate connectivity. I understand that bandwidth is expensive for mauritius, but i’m sure a little competition would stir up things! 256kbit is hardly state of the art.
Are nomad et al resellers of MT?
When Jean-Michel is talking debit, it is 100 Mbps. 2 Mbps loc is a start but Mauritius can not pretend to be a cyber island with only 10000 ADSL subscribers and 512 Kbps access at 130 EUR per month.
We have competition, we just don’t have the demand. The market for broadband services is small, with most people preferring to spend their disposable income on other things. Unlike in the West, an ADSL connection is not seen as a must-have for communications, education and entertainment needs. As for 6mbps being slow, well I have 12mbps and I rarely make full use of this. Being able to download things faster than most other people gets boring very quickly. Until the applications and as a result the customers demand 100mbps connections, then it won’t happen.
The point of JM Billaut is very clear Hi speed connectivity is not a question of economic value or a question of demand and supply.Do we have a market for air? Is it a question of Demand or supply?Can you leave regulation of air to market forces? Air is vital for all of us and it is the duty of people at the head of countries to ensure that we have breath able clean air.Like wise for the future of our Island it is the duty of the politicians to ensure that we have connectivity. Else Gloom or bloom.
In my earlier blog I did invite all mu bloggers to attend JM Billaut talk. Pity I did not get any response.
Come on guys, you all forget that we have a cyber tiger island named Singapore. To my surprise, u all compare our country to the huge ones where there are populations in terms of millions. Compare us to Singapore for God’s sake! Can anyone tell me how they felt, being in Sgp, for the very 1st day, just by window shopping. Completely lost, right? !!!Then, you’d say that we are really immature even reading tech sites on a daily basis, such as wirednews, cnet.com and so on… Well, believe me, I was lost too when I started working in Sgp after having worked in US for quite a few years. I’m quite old at computing (yes, old school C /delphi programming), have been working in Can/US/Fiji and S’gp and at present living in Thy lovely paradise island(no longer interested to work cauz of age; I like that phrase “chomeur en vacances”) but I have to say that Sgp was always the best when I do compare the speed at what we had in the so-called “west”. I do not know about Europe that much cause we all know/talk about UK/France but never Greece/Italy/Portugal. Furthermore, never worked in Europe. So, I can’t jot around irrelevant numbers. Could be faster or more or less the same as in Sgp.
What my last company hired us for, was when in 1998/9, the MIGHTY T1 came out. That was wreckless… for a start…supposedly. The funny part was that we had to have a dial-up to send external info(outgoing data e.g. email) since the sattelite wasn’t viable for receiving packets from the end-user via its host. Hope u got a glimpse at it but anyways, it could only send info at tremendous speed which I won’t explain thoroughly. Anyways, we were the makers of the T2, if we can say so. (I’m sorry if I’m boasting myself and other team mates but of course, there were many more engineers from different parts of the world who helped achieving our main goal) Thus, no more dial-up connectivity needed by that time. Dial-up was bypassed:) But if I tell you it was at a rate of 12,6 kbps(outgoing surge) on average, you’d be laughing, right. But we made it! That was our main view: Not to make a person having T1 using a dial-up cc for input sending.
But hey, we all live in Mauritius. There’s always a start. We’ll make it when it comes to that so-named “high” bandwidth but I do have to agree the prices are… should I say exclusive? May be MTML who’s gonna lease EASSy cable will do s/thing great to its future. I’m not sure whether MT is involved as a backdoor/trojan 🙂 Well, it’ll take its time; May be it’ll hover around, as to my guess, 3 to 4 years before getting a fierce competition since Mauritius is one of the spot(according to my experience) of a future cyber island. It’s coming, pls, be patient. That was the case with Fiji isl. Now I think they are well off with their “CONNECT” company. I wonder how the prices are for broadband though. Have no contact since I left there.
Guys, I hope I didn’t bast your b.lls, as we used to say back at work, but I just wanted to tell you that the future which is about to come to Mauritius. Does Take Time!
Thanks for your comments and vision of Mauritius! Shay
Good to see Mauritians flourishing else where!Oh yeah Singapore has been a model we are looking up to and also a country where a number of Mauritians have settled. I know of a Mauritian who settled in 1948 in Singapore!and who is at heart is still Mauritian.
Leave a Comment