The Hindu : Everest goes online

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Apr 19, 2003

National

National

Everest goes online

By Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore April 18. Fifty years after the first-ever conquest of Mount Everest by Tenzing and Hillary, the world's highest peak has gone online. Earlier this week, Tsering Gyaltsen, the grandson of a sherpa who helped shift equipment on that 1953 expedition, kept his own hi-tech tryst with the Himalayas: he has set up the world's highest Internet café at the 5300 metre-high Base Camp — the final take-off point for all Everest expeditions and the last contact with civilisation.

The icebound cybercafe housed in a tent sitting atop a glacier, went on online on Monday last. An Internet website simultaneously launched by Gyaltsen's enterprise (www.linkingeverest.com) pays tribute to what it calls the `Virtual Yeti Team' which helped create this facility which is likely to prove a boon for the thousands of trekkers, as well as the dozens of Everest expeditions which pass through Base Camp every year during the summer climbing season. It includes fellow sherpas as well as Indian and Nepali experts like Dinesh Shilpakar and Sanjay Shreshtha of WorldLink, an Internet service provider based in Kathmandu.

From the Base Camp the signals are sent by radio link to a server attached to a Very Small Aperture Satellite (VSAT) antenna at Kalapathar, at an altitude of 5450 metres. From here the signals are beamed to a satellite operated by SES Americom and relayed to an Internet provider in Taipei, Taiwan. When Sherpa Tsering first mooted the Everest cybercafe earlier this year, the logistic problems seemed insurmountable. The major problem of power was solved by using batteries backed by solar panels.

The project excited the global Net community and help came from many quarters: The New Jersey, U.S.-based satellite operator SES Americom, offered free connectivity for six months; Gordon Cook, author and publisher of the Internet newsletter, CookReport.com provided technical advice and Cisco donated three radio links.

Mr. Tsering already operates an Internet café in the less challenging environment of Namche on the Everest route, and provides the only satellite telephone service in the village to all expeditions passing through.

At his new Base Camp café, he plans to position four laptops, which expeditions can use to keep in touch with their climbing parties - a tremendous boost to their communications capability.

The New York Times reports that this will cost $2500 for the service, while casual visitors can surf for a dollar a minute or even make Net-based telephone calls.

This makes it possibly the priciest cybercafe in the world - but it's all for a good cause: the café is in the name of the `Sagarmatha

Pollution Control Committee' — a non-profit agency steered by Tsering, which helps clean up the mess left behind by expeditions along the Everest approaches. Edmund Hillary and other surviving members of 1953 first Everest expedition as well as many others who have climbed the peak since then are expected to converge in Nepal once more on May 29 — the fiftieth anniversary of the first climb. The Everest cybercafe seems nicely timed to lend a high-tech touch to this nostalgic event.

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