Connect to the Internet the old way during next Ethiopian lockdown?

Back in the day dial-up over GSM was supported via Circuit Switched Data (CSD). However, many carriers discontinued support for CSD when it was superseded by GPRS and EDGE. Furthermore, even if this was supported, it would most likely be turned off by the government when they disable Internet access.

This leaves you with the GSM voice channel which is only 9.6 kbps. The voice channel is further impaired by the audio compression which makes it rather unsuitable for data transmission. You should probably not expect data rates of more than 2.4 kbps.

However, a voice channel is a voice channel. If nothing else you should be able to use a modem via an old school audio coupler to your head phone jack using a very low bitrate modulation. Theoretically you could do the same with an app if you can find or make a softmodem app.

Failing anything else, there are a number of TCP over sound libraries that you could hack to work over a telephone call.

If land-lines work, dial-up is your best bet. If you can't find a provider and need to look for ones outside the country, you may have trouble reaching them (ex. if they don't provide service to other countries). In that case you can look for "ring-back" services.

The way it works is, you call a number and give them a number you want to dial, and hang up. They dial that number, and then dial yours on a second line, and bridge the two. This gets around high fees on outbound calls from, say, a tiny nation with a telecom monopoly. We used them back in the day in small island countries to cut the phone bill in half. Might also be useful for connecting to dial-up services that are restricted.

If you can't find one of those services, you can pay someone in another country to install a phreak box on two landlines that will do this for you. You build the box and hook it up to two phone lines. When someone calls the first number, the line immediately picks up and feeds a second phone line into the first (giving you a dial tone). You can either make it two-way or one-way. I can't remember the design (I built it 20 years ago) and I'm shit at electronics, but it was really simple, so hopefully another old head can reply with a schematic (I think I used photodiodes/photoresistors for some of it?).

And now that I think of it.... If you can't find an international dialup provider, you could just pay someone to run a dialup server for you. Just a computer with a modem and one phone line, and a broadband connection. Set up a DUN server on the computer (old Windows machines could do this) and NAT connections out on the broadband line. Your own private dial-up provider.

One option would be to use a setup similar to offshore sailors and cruisers:

https://www.cruiserswiki.org/wiki/Email_at_Sea

or, more generally, amateur band based radio links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winlink

The radios themselves get less and less expensive each year, especially with software defined radios, but unsure how easily/quickly one could get their hands on the required gear in Addis.

You could use https://briarproject.org/ for decentralized messaging. Once someone in your decentralized network has internet connection (by moving closer to Kenya for example) all the messages they collected would be relayed to the internet

Satellite is probably the best option. Probably Inmarsat's BGAN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_Global_Area_Network

If by "the old way" you mean, like, with a modem, aka "dial up"?

I'm not certain, but i think it's unfortunately not possible to use a modem over a cellular connection.

I'm putting this here calling out "model"/"dial-up" specifically, in case anyone else knows for sure.

This is may be a long shot, but I wonder what “shut down the internet” means from the ISPs perspective?

Do they turn off their 2/3/4G services at the tower, or do they just stop passing traffic to their upstream providers?

If the latter then it may mean that devices on the same network can still communicate with each other. I don’t think this will solve your problem, but it may still be helpful in some cases.

Can you send and receive texts internationally? You could have your emails relayed. My old phone company offered this, but I bet there's something you could run yourself.

Otherwise ring me and give me your password and I'll read the emails to you.

I think a lot of ideas are already here, but...

Figure out which outside country or countries are going to be least expensive to call (possibly through a dialback scheme), and then find a dial-up ISP in there and try to get an account setup.

A problem you'll have is a lot of free community access dial-up systems have shut down, and setting up an account in a foreign country where you have to pay for it, may be difficult. A lot of commercial dial-up services have also shut down too.

If you can make inexpensive calls to the US and/or Canada, you might be able to find something. I've seen references (in this thread and elsewhere) to "free" UK dialup, but it's using special rate phone numbers, so it's more like billed to your phone account dialup, and that may not be possible through whatever carrier you have available. Similar, I think for Germany.

It's worth sending a mail to xs4all; they did something for Libya, but they were also planning to shut off their dial-up service in October 2021. https://boingboing.net/2011/02/22/free-dial-up-isp-for.html (contact form https://www.xs4all.nl/klant/welcome-to-xs4all/ )

Traditional dial-up internet over some GSM voice codec probably won't work well. (https://superuser.com/questions/748154/use-a-smartphone-as-a...)

You would need to find an ISP which still provides dial up internet. zen internet in the UK has one, for example, but the number only really works in the country and maybe a few other places in Europe https://support.zen.co.uk/kb/Knowledgebase/DialUp-FAQs

Works if you have a landline and a modem on your computer. For mobile you'd need a modem and some way of connecting the modem to your mobile phone, or a phone that can be a modem, and a data cable. Not sure how possible this bit is though.

> As the war is reaching Addis Ababa, the Internet will be shut down there, too, pretty soon. We personally need to be connected to the internet (mainly just IMAP email) during lockdown

The question is also "by who and why". Could they grant an exemption to your IP range for business reasons?

If not and international texts are working, it might be possible to modify a lot of android handset to basically run TCP over Text Messages and use that to connect to IMAP. The local warlord might see the traffic but he might not care about plain business emails.

You've probably considered this but would it be an option to reach out to friends in the city who have satellite phones or work places with sat internet? Thinking NGO and foreign businesses.

If you can live with ~ 1 kbps and can afford some weeks of engineer time (and have someone abroad too) you can surely build a TCP/IP stack over sound.

See https://dspillustrations.com/pages/posts/misc/using-your-sou...

- use PPP to get your modem working https://wiki.debian.org/PPP, but make sure providers in Kenia still offer this service

- get sd cards and usb drives ready, so if all else fails you can institute a sneakernet like they do in Cuba

- consider using radio

- consider using scuttlebutt and/or briar, manyverse is a good android scuttlebutt client

Twillio offers API level text message sending. You'd use a twitter API -> twillio -> sms bridge to have twitter available…

Would something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.A.T.M.A.N. work? From what I understand as people gain and lose internet connectivity through whatever means, that becomes available to the network.

I read about this a while ago, not sure if it’s helpful since I don’t think it’s exactly what you’re looking for. Seems like you need collaborators to make this work.

https://mycelium-mesh.net/category/about.html

I'd go for narrow beam wi-fi bridge, dishes are really small and not very expensive ($200 a pair). But tracking those is also possible, though, harder to be spotted for the first time.

Dialup will perform terribly now over international and long distance -- our voice is compressed and converted to voice over IP for travel internationally. That's great for voice, it's terrible for modems. International ISDN might still work, but most circuits even if they are supposed to work are being discontinued.

Make sure you have shortwave radio and know frequencies for things like BBC, that will give you general information on what's going on across the country if nothing else.

Be aware even if you have internet access, not many people in country do, so things you read will likely be exaggerated rumours at best. It's this sort of environment that things like genocide can thrive.

The best bet would be something like an inmarsat bgan, which do work, and are fairly small, but obviously aren't cheap.

What happened to Facebook's LEO satellite constellation that was obviously going to target Africa? I know they did some launches

Another long shot: contact starlink team and see if they can sponsor you. It's could be great PR for them.

I would reasure with tech to satelite internet.

Hm, tricky! Could satellite Internet be of use…?

Would starlink work?

Sorry for sounding like a smart-ass, but wouldn't asking an Ethiopian tech forum be better than asking Hacker News, which do not know all that much about local situations and local solutions?

Also good luck. My friend used to be in Addis Ababa, when the war was confined just to Tigray, and he said it's a great place, but he was (rightly) afraid that it will spread and escaped. It does not sound good.