Chris In Cambo

Almost all of the problems that we hear about in Cambodia such as child-malnutrition, infant mortality, death from preventable diseases or mothers dying during child birth are symptoms of the same problem - poverty. The right to be properly fed as a child, the right to give birth without a significant risk of death and the right to not be struck down often before your fifth birthday by preventable disease are the most fundamental of human rights and eclipse all others.

Cambodia has made HUGE economic gains in the last 10 years, and all of us who have been here long enough don’t even need to read a report to know the results, we can see with our own eyes the massive improvement this positive economic change has bought to the lives of millions of Cambodians.

If the pace of development continues at its current rate Cambodia could become a middle income country within the next twenty years. It’s not so long ago that if someone even made such a suggestion they would have been made a laughing stock, but now one only needs to look out of their Phnom Penh window to not only know that it’s possible, but that it’s actually already happening in pockets of Cambodia and spreading out fast from the capital to provincial centers.

The problem now though is that Cambodia has already picked most of its low hanging fruit. To continue near double digit growth the country needs to become more efficient and more productive in order to increase economic output. For this to happen Cambodia needs modernise its infrastructure, increase the annual agricultural yield, monetise its natural resources and continue its construction boom. These things aren’t easy challenges for any developing country, but for Cambodia land issues make them particularly challenging.

I think Cambodia is in an impossible position when it comes to land issues. Cambodia’s situation is unique, the Khmer Rouge destroyed all land records and then in the chaotic decades that followed their demise the various powers were too busy fighting a civil war to frankly care where people were putting their houses or farms.

A situation where people were not prevented from settling and building houses in the road reserves of national highways, on state land, or along (or even over) railway lines should have never been allowed to occur, but the fact of the matter is that it did occur and that leaves us with the impossible question of what to do about it?

There is no easy answer, for the government its a case of being damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Option 1 (Fair Failure): You allow people to stay on state land, on road reserves, over railways, you cancel projects, you turn away foreign investment and Cambodia’s impressive economic growth stalls. The people on the land are happy today, but their children and the children of millions of other families across the country face the prospect of Cambodia never being anything but a low income basket case with most families living hand to mouth as subsistence farmers.

Option 2 (Unfair Success): You subscribe to the East Asian model of economic development where its all about the destination rather than the journey, the top 5% accumulate massive wealth and aren’t afraid to spend it, the trickle down effect then lifts millions out of poverty. A system where the suffering and hardships faced by the minority of people who were unfortunate enough to be in the way of economic development is justified by the many more who will benefit from the GDP growth in the years to come.

Option 3 (The Fairy Tale): Of course you will always have the dreamers who are deluded into thinking that the soft, warm aura of idealism is a match for the cold, hard armor of economics. They will call for legislation that ensures compensation even if the person is illegally on the land (for however long). This sounds nice, but basically has the same effect as the first option, the government doesn’t have the funds to pick up the tab so it must be passed on the investor, for whom the ROI no longer make sense for a higher risk investment so they’re no longer interested.

At the moment the government as we all know is subscribing to the second option, and in the absence of a better option, I have to say that I agree. I would love to believe there was a way that a country can develop in a fair and inclusive way from the bottom up, but as the numerous disastrous experiments in this model have proven over the last hundred years, it’s not only impossible, it is in most cases disastrous. Cambodia being a case in point, it was such an experiment that lead Cambodia in it’s current state of affairs.

As Westerns we like to take the morel high ground and pass down our pearls of wisdom regarding democracy, freedom of speech, right to assembly and other ‘luxury grade’ human rights. But the fact of the matter is that the path to the economic success of our homelands made what’s going on in modern day Cambodia look like some kind of Utopian fairy tale. We stole entire countries and continents and wiped them clean of their natural resources, enslaved millions and drove numerous ethnic groups to the brink of annihilation.

All of us today are still benefiting from the biblical level suffering that our past generations handed out, so before we go giving advise from the comfort of our privileged western lifestyles, we should ask ourselves whether or not we would be willing to sacrifice that lifestyle and all of those comforts in order to assist people who are experiencing such hardships today at the hands of modern day oppressors. No….? I didn’t think so.

It breaks my heart when I read stories of families being evicted from their homes, I can’t even begin to imagine how terrible that situation must be. But I try to raise my thinking above the level of emotion and strive to be a realist and a pragmatist and as such I understand that this is the lesser of the two evils and that Cambodia must follow the only path that’s been proven to lead a country away from poverty and all of it’s horrific symptoms - economic growth, at any cost.

As we all know from the huge billboards all over town and the none stop TV and newspaper ads the telco’s here are really slugging it out over their respective 3G offerings at the moment. This is great news for us consumers, as it’s a buyers market! I mean, just check out the current deal from Mobitel, unlimited 3G for $5 a month?!!!!

There’s been talk for a long time that Cambodia was going ‘leap frog’ its neighbours by skipping, copper and fibre and going straight to wireless technologies, but now it’s not just talk, it’s actually happening and it’s amazing to watch.

The numbers are phenomenal for such a small country, we have five separate mobile companies offering 3G (Beeline about to make it six!), and another four offering WiMax.

I’ve got a head cold today so wasn’t in the mood for code, so instead I decided to do a pepsi challenge on the pre-paid plans from Mobitel, Hello and Metfone.

The test isn’t that scientific, I’m just chucking the sim cards in my HTC Desire, tethering it to my computer and running SpeedTest.net to a London server from my mother in laws house on the outskirts of Phnom Penh.

Here are the results:

Mobitel

Ok so let’s test the market incumbent that’s now having it’s dominant position challenged from all sides.

Price: $5 per month, unlimited data usage

Speed:

Conclusion:

So, we have very good down speed, very poor up speed and a terrible ping time. Mobitel’s connection has gone down hill since they slashed the prices probably as a result of over subscription. Mobitel is great for downloads and I often get speeds over 4Mb/s but the latency and up speed make it very poor for surfing and things like Skype.

Hello

Next we have Hello the perennial under achiever, they capitalised for a short while on Mobitel’s f*#k up last year when they suddenly stopped offering unlimited data and bumped up their data prices to crazy levels. They were also the first to start behaving like an ISP by offering a 3G dongle option (which now they are all doing).

Cost:

$20-$90 per month (depending on speed) with unlimited data.

Speed: (Disclaimer: I can only get 2 bar HSDPA signal at this location)

Conclusion:

This was a competitive package one or two years ago, but the internet market in Cambodia is changing very quickly, the price and the speed just don’t cut it any more. Admittedly I had a weak signal when taking the test and have seen quicker speeds from Hello, but this is a Hello problem, unlike the others they don’t seem to have blanket 3g coverage in Phnom Penh and I often get switched to Edge in curtain locations.

Metfone

The new kid on the block, owned by Vietel (Vietnam’s biggest telco) this lot seem to have Mobitel running scared and I’m not surprised as they have come in very aggressively, laying their own fiber optic network out to all provincial capitals and then beginning their public private partnership pledge to connect every high school in the country. Then giving free sim cards to the entire military. They clearly have a lot of money to burn and know the technology but still Mobitel are running rings around them in terms of the advertising campaigns and market image. Anyway who gives a crap about that, I just want quick internet on my phone!

Cost:

Metfone have a very complicated array of plans, a terrible website and customer service that makes Mobitel look good. But the price basically boils down to about $2/GB which isn’t bad. I actually prefer a sensibly priced pay for what you use model as apposed to unlimited as it keeps all the bit-torrent and download freaks off the network and doesn’t give any incentive to throttle.

Speed:

Conclusion:

Cheaper than Hello, more expensive than Mobitel, but the best quality connection of the three by a long shot. The ping times and up-speeds are acceptable and it shows in the browsing which feels snappy and responsive.

Final Conclusion

For me Metfone is clearly at the top of the stack, their numbers are consistent and their pay for usage as apposed to unlimited is in my opinion a big plus as it will stop the service being degraded by high bandwidth users and gives them no incentive to throttle the line.

These are all prepaid so there is absolutely no reason why you can’t have a sim from all three sat around and if one’s having an off day just put another in your dongle.

The other trick with the internet in Cambodia is to stay agile, the internet market is changing so quickly here at the moment that in six months I’m sure the conclusions won’t be the same, so remember not to get locked into any contracts or expensive setup fee’s so that you can change your internet providers like the weather.

Anonymous asked: Chris are you signing up for a slice?

Yes, I am.

Occasionally after a hard reboot, next time you startup you’ll get a black screen after grub.

To fix, boot to a live CD, fire up the terminal and do:

sudo e2fsck -C0 -p -f -v /dev/sda1 (might not be sda1 for you)

If this comes back reporting errors, then do:

sudo e2fsck -c -k -v /dev/sda1

Earlier Tweet: “I really like the idea of blogging and have lots to say, but unfortunately Sloth from the Goonies has more advanced literary skills than me.”

I’m stuck in bed with tonsillitis, so what a great chance to do some studying to improve my writing style and technique. Trawling through Amazon reviews I came across On Writing Well by William Zinsser which seems to offer a solution to my problem.

I’m only one chapter in but am already thoroughly enjoying it, take this quote:

Your job as a writer is to present one idea in a sentence and let the reader grasp that idea and then present the next idea and let the reader grasp that, and so on…Learn to break a long sentence into two short sentences. Or into three short sentences. There is no sentence that is too short to be acceptable in the eyes of God.

Now the God reference aside, these are the kind of rules that my logical mind can understand and replicate. It sounds just like single responsibility principle in object oriented programming!

At the end of the first section, the author offers the reader to take the last thing they wrote and simplify it by halving its length without loosing literary voice or any of the organic style (not sure I have a literary voice or any style for that matter). I rewrote my last blog post about the Kindle DX. Here’s what I ended up with after a five minute refactoring:

Almost all of the titles that I read/want are not available here in Phnom Penh. Currently I either have to order from Amazon and wait a week or two for delivery or source the ebook—when available—and get a bound copy printed at a local copy shop. Neither are quick or convenient, which is why I’ve ordered a Kindle DX.

To me the DX is more interesting than the previous iterations as it’s been optimised for use with technical books. It now has a 10-inch screen and PDF support which Amazon tells me should make reading titles which are rich in images, diagrams and syntax easier to read.

Amazon has clearly worked hard on bring technical publishers into the loop. I just checked, and all of the last five hard titles I bought are all available in the Kindle store. Last time I checked there were none.

Once it arrives I’ll let you know if it lives up to my expectations.

It’s still not going to win any prizes, but I feel that it’s an improvement. More importantly though, writing it was quick and easy as I had some very simple rules which I could follow.

I’ve always liked the idea of an ebook reader, but as the technical and non-fiction books that I usually read weren’t available in the Kindle store and PDF support was so crap on its competitors none of them were really offering what I was looking for when I checked early last year.

Anyway I decided to take another look and see what’s changed and discovered the Kindle DX, it has a 10-inch screen and has been specifically optimised for reading the kind of books that I love, but not only that the Kindle store is now jam packed with technical and non-fiction titles. At $489 it’s not cheap, but compared to the time I waste trying to source books normally it will have paid for itself within six months.

It’s going to be sooooo good being able to instantly get my hands on the title I’m after, as the kind of books that I read are often difficult to source back home, here in Phnom Penh I have no chance. So currently when I want a title I have to either order it from Amazon and wait for it to eventually turn up (sometimes weeks later) or try and source the ebook (by any means possible ;-).

In Phnom Penh you can take a PDF ebook to a copy shop and in two days they will make a bound copy which looks nearly identical to an original, this is good but still takes time and now more often than not the book is only available for Adobe Digital Editions which is doubly crap as I have to read on a screen and it Digital Editions isn’t available for Linux so I have to use Windows.

Amazon seem to think it will be here on Monday (I’ll believe it when I see it). I’ll follow up on this post then and hopefully will be saying that it’s everything I hoped it would be!