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Web-only Exclusives November 30, 2000 From Our Correspondent: Hirohito and the War A conversation with biographer Herbert Bix From Our Correspondent: A Rough Road Ahead Bad news for the Philippines - and some others From Our Correspondent: Making Enemies Indonesia needs friends. So why is it picking fights? |
JANUARY 28, 2000 VOL. 26 NO. 3
The World in a Backpack
Go-anywhere Net access is possible but pricey
By JULIAN GEARING Kathmandu
 At a temple overlooking Kathmandu, Telstra IT specialist Peter Shanks phones home Julian Gearing for Asiaweek |
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Portable, personal satellite transmitters/receivers made by Nera Satellite Communications in Norway and Denmark's Thrane & Thrane, both operated by Telstra, the Australian telecommunications company, are being marketed as all-purpose information appliances that can link to the Internet, transmit real-time video and allow users to phone home miles away from the nearest dial tone. Connected to a laptop, "you have a phone, a fax, data connections with e-mail and Internet," says Telstra technical specialist Peter Shanks. Talk about moving personal computing off the desktop. Shanks tested Telstra's Nera World Communicator by setting up a website while trekking in the Australian Outback.
ALSO IN ASIAWEEK
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Nevertheless, Shanks says the devices have numerous field applications for mining prospectors, engineers, itinerant doctors, journalists and businessmen. Last month, Telstra demonstrated another use by linking impoverished children in a dusty schoolyard in Nepal with the Internet and journalists in Singapore. Virendra Bahadur Rajaure, headmaster of the Tika Vidyashram Secondary School near Kathmandu, called the demonstration "a great opportunity for the children at our school [which suffers from Nepal's poor telephone service] to gain computer knowledge."
A sales opportunity it is not. "The school just doesn't have the funding to supply equipment and training on its own," says Rajaure. The NeraWorldCommunicator costs $10,000 and sending data another $5 a minute. The high cost of hardware and airtime contributed to last year's bankruptcy of the groundbreaking Iridium satellite phone network - a bad omen for the viability of personal satellite communications systems. E.T. could have used one of these things to phone home. It remains to be seen whether earthlings have the same compelling need.
FELINE GROOVY
Everyone is in favor of PCs dropping their boring beige livery, but what have we done to deserve this? For those who found the Hello Kitty toaster too low tech, Hong Kong's characterPC.com is offering a computer with the ubiquitous cat's perplexed little face plastered on it. The budget PC won't set performance records, but at $900 it won't break the bank either. Aimed at kids, the machine (colored black rather than the usual kitten-tongue pink) comes bundled with educational software and free computer lessons. Unfortunately there is no cat scanner.
READY AND CABLE
Part of the first undersea optical fiber cable to directly link the U.S. and China entered service on Jan. 10. When the rest of the pipeline opens this fall it will form a ring, also linking Korea, Taiwan, Japan and Guam, capable of carrying 80 gigabits of data per-second. That's the equivalent of four million simultaneous telephone calls.
SPUNKY MONKEY
Say hello to Tetra, a rhesus macaque monkey and the first primate to be successfully cloned. U.S. researchers created her by splitting an embryo into four very early on in its development. Although Tetra's three genetically-identical siblings did not survive, scientists hope the technique (already used commonly in animals such as cattle) can be refined to produce sets of cloned monkeys for use as lab animals. The same process could theoretically be used to clone humans. In 1993, Dr. Jerry Hall claimed to have cloned a human embryo by splitting it, which he then immediately destroyed.
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