Dust off your dialup modem to contact Egypt

RNW, 31 January 2011, by Willemien Groot

(Photo: ANP)

With the internet down and SMS services unavailable, most of Egypt is closed off from the rest of the world. This makes distributing eyewitness reports very difficult. Radio hams, hackers and bloggers from all across the globe are desperately trying to set up make connections and to distribute information.

Until Saturday night it wasn’t even possible for Egyptians to use their mobile phones. In order to break the large-scale protests the Egyptian authorities are using all possible means to cut off communication channels. But an old-school analogue communication platform turns out to be very helpful. So messages are coming out off Egypt through regular landline phones.

“Thanks to many dedicated bloggers outside of Egypt”, says Manal Hassan, an Egyptian blogger operating from South Africa.

“So what we’ve been trying to do is get in touch with some of the activists on the ground who had firsthand accounts of what is happening. And then we would try to publish it on the internet: on our blog, on twitter and other social networks. On Saturday the government brought back the voice mobile communication. SMS is still down until now. But at least we could get in touch with activists in the protest itself. We would call them and ask them about what’s happening, about the people’s reactions and we could even hear some of the chants in the protest. And then we would post these updates.”

Old-school communication

Internet traffic is not entirely impossible. A Swedish online group of internet activists, hackers and ‘freedom-of-speech-activists’ known as Telecomix is working on setting up connections through the old-fashioned dialup phone modems, that many of us know from the nineties”, says Telecomix’s Christopher Kullenberg.

“We were looking around for dialup connections that were still active at some European Internet Service Providers. We found a few and we managed to send in dialup numbers onto modem pools in Sweden and France. And we had a few Egyptian people calling up using old- style modems to get on the internet.”

Modems wanted

In the West, dialup internet access has been obsolete for almost a decade but it is currently the only way to connect digitally with Egypt, says Kullenberg.

Making use of landlines in Egypt is not without its dangers. There is a good chance the lines are tapped. Also the connections are often slow and unstable and the costs of these connections are high.

Radio hams

Radio hams occasionally distribute messages from Egypt. They communicate in Morse Code, putting their lives in danger because both their transmitters and identities can easily be traced by the authorities.

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