ictdchick

Admittedly, I had solved two thirds of this problem this past summer.  But I think it speaks to the rapidity of mobile phone coverage expansion that solving the last third was much easier than I expected it would be.

The problem: GPRS/Internet access on my various phones on all three of the GSM carriers in Uganda, MTN, Celtel, and Uganda Telecom (UTL).  (For acronym explanations see footnoote*.) 

Before I digress, here are the configuration options:

Celtel
Access Point Name (APN): internet.ug.celtel.com (alternate: wap.ug.celtel.com)
Username/Password: none
Authentication: none
Proxy Server: 192.168.100.10, port 9401 (wap clients use port 9201)
IP Address: dynamic (server-assigned)
DNS Address: dynamic (server-assigned)
Celtel will automatically configure some phones if you send an SMS to 175 with the message “internet” (Case-sensitive)

Uganda Telecom
Access Point Name (APN): utweb 
Username/Password: none
Authentication: none
Proxy Server: none
IP Address: dynamic (server-assigned)
DNS Address: dynamic (server-assigned)

MTN^
Access Point Name (APN): yellopix.mtn.co.ug
Username/Password: none
Authentication: none
Proxy Server: none
IP Address: 10.120.0.138 
DNS Address: dynamic (server-assigned)
^to use MTN, you also need to contact them to enable Internet on your account

I managed to get the Celtel configuration from a local office here in Mbarara, mostly by poking around on my phones and switching SIM cards until they pulled out the configuration manual and handed it to me. For MTN and UTL I went to the respective offices in Kampala to get the configuration instructions.  This is the type of info I think would make sense to provide on their web sites - but generally the most information I can find is that they offer the service, with no information on pricing or how to connect them.

This trip I have three mobiles with me, the HP iPAQ hw6945 (Windows Mobile 5), my Treo 650 (Palm/GarnetOS), and the HTC s710 (Windows Mobile 6). MTN I still have only working on the HTC phone - I can get it to connect on the Treo, but can’t actually access the Internet. UTL is by far the easiest to configure - just enter utweb as the APN, and you are ready to go. Unfortunately, UTL’s coverage isn’t as consistent - while I have so far always been able to get MTN and Celtel in the rural clinics I’ve visited, UTL wasn’t reachable in the two clinics in Rubindi. Since I’m planning to use Treos for the SmartForms project I’m pretty relieved I managed to get Celtel GPRS working on mine.

The trick was (since the automatic configuration didn’t work - my phones seem to always be too new for them to have customized instructions available) was that the IP address they gave me was for a proxy server, not the phone.  And proxy server configuration is moderately painful. On the Treo you can set up the GPRS connection through the “Prefs” app; click on “Network” for the GPRS settings.  The nice thing about this one is that you can connect there and test the connection.  Also in the “Prefs” app, click on “IBM Java VM” to  set the HTTP Proxy to “192.168.100.10:9401″ (server:port). Then you also need to configure the proxy for Blazer, the web browser.  Launch “Web” and cancel the download. From the Options menu select Preferences. You’ll see three tabs - click the Advanced tab, then click the “Set Proxy” button on the bottom right of the screen. Check “Use custom proxy” and enter 192.168.100.10 for the Proxy Server, and 9401 for the Port. From there you can go back to the browser and try to load a web page. (I generally use http://m.google.com.)

On the HTC, you configure one proxy for all of the applications. Go into connections (Settings->Connections->GPRS), configure Celtel as a “WAP Area Network”, and then set up a separate http proxy (Settings->Connections->Proxy) that connects the “WAP Area Network” to “Internet”.   There are a lot of backwards things about configuring GPRS on the HTC.  At first it seems straightforward - just add a new GPRS connection.  But when you are like me, and you use the phone on lots of networks in lots of countries, then you also have to go in and set all the connections you aren’t using to connect to a non-Internet network (I use “Secure WAP Area Server”, since I don’t normally need that connection), and set the one you actually are using to “Internet”, or in the case of  Celtel, to “WAP Area Network”.

What boggles my mind is the fact that people still need a book with individual instructions on how to set up GPRS for the phones.  Even for the windows mobile phones, every phone has a different configuration - I still don’t know why MTN works on the HTC s710 wm6 phone, but not on any of the wm5 phones.  The only possible reason I can think of is that its possible to specify “None” for authentication on the s710, while wm6 requires you to specify CHAP or PAP.  I think, though, that the non-smartphones, especially the basic Nokias, work just fine.

So!  Now you know how to get Internet service on your phone in Uganda. Happy surfing!

* General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is the protocol that allows you to access the Internet through a GSM mobile phone network.  For those of you in the Bay Area, AT&T/Cingular and T-mobile are GSM networks - you can recognize a GSM network because they issue you a smartchip to put in your phone, also known as a Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card. Your phone number is tied to the SIM card than your phone, so to switch to a new phone, you just need to remove the chip from your old phone and put it in the new one. As long as the new phone is not “locked” all your calls will be routed through the new phone.

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This is where I’ll be come December 15th. I unfortunately didn’t submit a paper this time, since I was in four different countries (not counting layovers) in the week before the deadline. But! a lot of my colleagues have papers that got in, and it promises to be a good chance to talk to other people in this area. It will be a relief to just be a participant this time and not a behind-the-scenes volunteer…

(Early reg deadline is on Nov 15th.)

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ICTD2007 Call for Participation
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2nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD2007)

http://research.microsoft.com/workshops/ictd2007

December 15-16, 2007
Bangalore, India

Following on a successful conference at Berkeley in May of 2006 (http://sims.berkeley.edu/ictd2006), we are pleased to announce the second ICTD conference to take place in Bangalore, India!
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So I’m talking to my doctor about possible drug interactions between various prescriptions and he pulls out a… (drum roll) palm treo. Oh okay so that’s probably not a major revelation.. doctors love Palm devices and have loved them pretty much since 3COM started making them back in the 90s. (Can I say that yet? Back in the 90s?) And of course my immediate reaction is to ask him what software he uses, mentioning that I’m looking into what software might be useful for rural clinics in developing countries (e.g. Ghana and Uganda and D.R. Congo). He replied: you only need one! It’s called Epocrates.. like Hippocrates, but with an ‘e’! Clever, huh? (Okay I’m paraphrasing, but only a tiny tiny bit.) Then he proceeded to show me a drug database, a symptoms database, and a diagnosis database, all hyperlinked together.

Of course - before everyone goes off running to deliver this very fine product to the masses of doctors in developing countries, there are a couple of catches. The data is very much geared towards doctors in the US, which has a number of implications. 1) Only the drugs that are available in the US are listed, and then with the US names. So, for example, many of the newer malaria medications which haven’t been approved in the US (like Coartem) won’t be there. And other drugs like paracetamol (as it is known in the UK and former British colonies like Ghana and Uganda) will be listed as acetaminophen. 2) There’s a yearly recurring cost of $100. Of course, this might not be out of reach for these doctors, and certainly is about equivalent in price to the paper versions of these reference guides, and about 1000 times more portable.. 3) The pathology is different - a doctor in the US wouldn’t expect TB, where a doctor in Uganda or Ghana would know to look for TB symptoms.

I bring all this up because I spent part of this past summer in Uganda with the 2007 East Africa Blum Fellows visiting some of the Uganda Health Information Network (UHIN) deployment sites in Lyantonde and Rakai. What struck me most was not the specific programs offered by the project (digital submission of health outpatient statistics, and dissemination of malaria and pediatric health information), but rather how they appropriated the devices, installing and sharing their own applications, and using the Excel application to track inventory and patient logs. They just drink up this data, reading whatever they can get to learn more about how they can care for the wide variety of conditions they see every day. So.. in addition to whatever information management functions I can put into place, I hope I can also help put more information in the hands of the doctors and clinicians and nurses I’m working with.

There’s of course still a lot of other issues to deal with - everything from power for recharging to the cost of the devices themselves (~$70 for a Palm, and $300 for a Palm+Mobile Treo) to maintenance and sustainability. I still want to try putting this type of information in their hands, with all of the appropriate warnings, as well as more locally specific information, like local health bulletins or Hesperian’s translated Where There is No Doctor series. Let me know if you have any suggestions for mobile health applications!

Fulfillment Elusive for Young Altruists In the Crowded Field of Public Interest

By Ian Shapira
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 2, 2007; Page A01

A friend pointed out this article for me. I have to wonder that if in our efforts to look at ICTD academically if we’re going to create another glut of idealists with nowhere to go. But there’s so much to do! I have been watching interest in this area grow over the past three years, and have high hopes that the entrepreneurial spirit of this generation of b-school and international relations graduates will be able to look beyond the traditional NGO positions and forge ahead with their own grassroots efforts. And of course, that this crop of people will be well trained to listen and live with the communities they want to help, and genuinely provide services that the communities need in a way that they can sustain them.

I’m not sure what all the schools are that have a good focus on information technology and international development. It seems that most Poli Sci, Public Health, and Public Policy programs are fairly cognizant of the theoretical issues around development, but are not always as well versed in technology. Haas Business school at Berkeley is fairly experiential in this area and actually sends students (where possible) to developing countries like Ghana. They are also part of the Global Social Venture Competition, along with London Business School and Columbia Business school, which have given rise to entrepreneurial efforts like World of Good and many other socially-minded organizations. Cornell’s Johnson School of Business also has a Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise which sends people to developing countries, knowing that while not everyone will continue to work on sustainable development post-graduation, the experiences they have as part of the program will be useful no matter where they end up. And of course I have to mention the Blum Center for Developing Economies, which sponsors a lot of my research and has recently started a new minor for undergraduates.

From a computer science perspective - developing new technologies explicitly designed for the infrastructural, economic, political, and social realities in developing regions, there is (of course) the multi-disciplinary TIER group at UC Berkeley, some work being done at University of Washington, and Keshav’s Tetherless Computing group at University of Waterloo, in addition to the very capable individuals scattered throughout other universities.

Investing in Entrepreneurs in Developing Countries — A Talk Sponsored by The Blum Center
Wednesday, November 14th
6:00pm
Hearst Memorial Mining Building, Room 290, UC Berkeley Campus
Please join The Blum Center for Developing Economies for a talk on:
“Creating an online investment platform for entrepreneurs in developing countries”
Thierry Sanders and Koen Wasmus, Directors of the Business in Development BiD Network Foundation.
A reception and graduate student mixer will follow.
Please RSVP: http://blumcenter.berkeley.edu/events/BID

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