[nickpsecurity]

Do your customers tolerate all that? As in, can you ignore a good chunk of it because Internet issues are more acceptable in Africa? Or did you have to prevent, detect, and/or mitigate all of it because they expect nearly-perfect Internet in your area?

[froztbyte]

By way of answering, let me recount a short story for you.

It takes place during the very first time I visited Kampala (the capital of Uganda). It was about 3 years before I had started working in the ISP/telecom space in Africa. This particular trip was soccer-specific (I was working on the team that delivered one of the big trans-national African tournaments' games on television), thus the non-ISP nature of it.

We arrive at our hotel, having driven just under an hour from Entebbe to Kampala. It's fairly pleasant, albeit a tad humid (it's mid-day and near the equator after all; 36C and >=70% humidity - not the worst). There's a group of around 30 of us that now need to check in... this always takes a little while.

So, everything goes on. You loaf around the hotel reception until it's your point in the queue, grab some water now and then when you can. Finally, you're standing at the front desk, starting your process of checkin.

You read off your name... the person behind the counter finds you in the list (of fortunately mostly checked-off people - yay alphabet precedence!), and starts doing some stuff on the front desk computer. At which point you glance over to said desktop and notice the UPS jacked into the UPS jacked into the UPS (yes, three) jacked into the computer. You idly inquire about this. The response is "oh, yeah, the other ones died with all the power outages".

Not a joke, as it turns out. While you're doing your checking, the building experiences a brownout twice.

Years later, you get there for a totally different reason. Time (literal years) has passed. And during setup of some equipment (here, I'm skipping about two days' worth of time), you find that the reason your laptop screen kept dimming and your DC UPS' kept beeping.... is because you're getting such major voltage swings on the building feed that everything is going over-or-under-voltage.

This is daily life (in many parts of Africa). It isn't a thing to fight against. It just is. You take it, and try to do your utter best. You try to deliver your utter best.

And if you just push hard enough (and, imo, if you're really, really lucky) you maybe get somewhere with it!

[fegul]

I also work in tech in Africa (2nd largest population on the continent if that's any indication) and it is certainly challenging.

Love to chat/commiserate more about your experiences

[nickpsecurity]

Interesting. So, you actually had it easier than Chris since the expectations of service are so low in Africa. You might have had it harder because of all the extra issues you deal with. As I figured, it's not as straight-forward as your original comment implied.

[froztbyte]

Ah, no no. The expectations are not low.

People are paying for a service, and they expect it to work.

I once (another country, another ISP) dealt with a query/complaint of "it doesn't work!" which turned out to be due to a snowstorm taking out _the entire area_. Which people knew about! And still complained!

The expectation for the service is really much of the same.

Almost ironically, the first marker that people phone about is "my email doesn't work!"

edit/addendum: your customers also have their own solutions for dealing with power outages - more UPSs, generators, laptops (with internal wimax or 3G chips), etc

[nickpsecurity]

In that case, your comment stands and it seems like a hell of a tough market.

[froztbyte]

Yeah... it's tough..

Still, I'm sticking around. There's potential to do good here.

[nickpsecurity]

Also interested in you doing a detailed writeup on your tactics, costs, etc as an African ISP.

[froztbyte]

As a mini-followup: due to this kind of scenario, we ended up having to replace UPS battery packs in about 8 months (1/3 of their minimum intended lifecycle) due to how heavily they got load-rushed over the months.

The load cycle literally killed them in that time.

[amenod]

Interesting - so I guess there is need for a solution which charges UPS-es in some smarter way?

[extrapickles]

Better smarts on discharge of the UPS can help. Most of them currently let the battery pack fully discharge, causing irreversible damage to the battery pack, especially if power isn't restored quickly. A setting for cutting out at 40% depth of charge would prevent damage to the pack.

Over provisioning the runtime on the UPS can help if you can afford the extra upfront cost.

What someone really needs to do is make a UPS that just attaches to a standard deep cycle battery, as those can be easily sourced locally pretty much anywhere and one can pick the battery to fit the application, rather than be stuck with the crap batteries the UPS manufacturer decides to use (they typically use high C batteries which do not like deep cycling).

[mschuster91]

I don't believe that in a situation with wildly fluctuating power there is any alternative to "grab all available energy from the grid when there is power", you never know how huge the next brown/blackout will be.

What could definitely help is putting good power conditioning equipment in front of the UPS. That at least will protect the AC-to-DC first stage from overvoltages and shorter brownouts. If the PCE comes with fat enough supercaps, it can also protect the main UPS by preventing it from draining the battery at all.

[AnAfrican]

As the parent has said, the consumer are paying and often higher prices than in Europe so they complain. A LOT.