9961: 27 gourdes per dollar (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Jedidiah <his_voidness@yahoo.com>

On wednesday the bank gave 27 gou per dollar U$.

They say that the exchange rate fell immediately after
la guerre ben laden started. Certainly the pov are
more desperate today than I've seen them in my
almost 5 years of visiting hayti. The myriad small
construction projects have halted, thousands  of day
laborers are idle, ti marchann in the neighborhoods
have closed down, bankrupt due to the inability of
clients to pay off kredit.

All this, apparently, fall out from the elimination of
many bottom rung jobs in the USA; jobs held by
immigrants, Haitians and Mexicans among many others.

Infrastructure:
It was asked whether the government should be
investing
in internet access for the provinces. Well, no, of
course
they shouldn't directly run cyber cafe's.
As a matter of fact, the thousands of new cyber cafes'
are mostly providing long distance telephone service
via net2phone. Voice over IP is replacing the call
centers formerly run by Teleco.

It appears to me that Teleco is encouraging the demise
of their call centers by encouraging ( and taxing )
voice over IP at cyber cafes. The fact that internet
access is required for this gives us web browsing
almost as a side effect.

Teleco's investment in main lines is allowing reliable
connections which permit voice over IP. This is good
infrastucture investment which is finally starting to
pay off. Making the call centers irrelevant will
reduce
the opportunity for bitching at Teleco, and reduce
direct staffing somewhat.
Also, voice over IP allows many more circuits on the
same wires than a fixed point to point analog
connection.

Cell phones:
Haitel and Comcell are expanding, altho St Marc has
Haitel and I have comcell.
Teleco Wireless now exists. I don't know if they are
providing hand held phone service to compete with
Hai/Com in that market.
What they are providing is 'fixed wireless', which I
advocated some three years ago. For 90 U$D they
install
a fixed phone with cellular connection. 20U$D per
month
is the fixed charge, with no per minute charges.
This gets around the copper wire bottle neck and
expense.
New technology is cheaper than stringing Alexander
Graham Bells copper strands.



=====
J. David Lyall,
http://www.lyalls.net/

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