Word: coppers
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...Phones here have been known to be so bad that journalist colleagues use satellite phones to call across town. And they're at their worst when it rains. Many of the old copper lines simply can't cope with wet weather. When a two year long drought broke earlier this year, Kenyans thanked God. At long last they could have regular power and water again. They were less pleased when whole suburbs of Nairobi lost their phone lines for a month. Thus affected, I rang Telkom Kenya, the state-owned monopoly, from my one working line every few days...
...state and federal agencies--from the irs to the FDA--have offices in town. Here only Customs and the National Guard carry side arms. The feds lack the troops to check every truck, so they inspect randomly. On an average day, about 8,000 trucks will cross here, hauling copper wire and auto parts into Mexico and bringing clock radios and car chassis back. Customs collects $619,000 in federal taxes and duties daily...
...time being, we wish our copper-feathered friend the best of luck. He’ll need it. Dodging the watchful eyes of the military (and the hapless pursuit of ’Poonsters) will be enough to keep him busy in the People’s Republic. How long he will remain there is uncertain...
Modalen isn't the easiest place to wire. Nera has supplied each house with plate-sized antennas allowing families to link to the Net by a radio linkup. (As the town's few residents are scattered over 385 sq km, using copper or fiber-optic cable would be too pricey.) The Internet is connected to a set-top box on a TV, controlled by a wireless keyboard. Modalen's 2 megabits per second is roughly 35 times as fast as conventional modems. Each customer pays $18 a month for the service; the municipality covered the installation costs of nearly...
...example, a dial-up modem that connects to the Net over copper has a typical download speed of 56 kilobits--or 56,000 bits--per second, at which rate it would take nearly 10 minutes to download a three-minute song. By contrast, a modem connected to a TV cable that feeds into a fiber-optic loop could claim that tune in under a minute. Yet even today only about 6% of U.S. households have cable modems or digital subscriber lines, which carry compressed data over copper wires at broadband speed. But that hasn't stopped carriers from blanketing...