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RED CIENTIFICA PERUANA                           GUYANA
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NETWORKING PROSPECTS FOR GUYANA

This report about Guyana is special in that Guyana does not
have an electronic network. The historical reasons for this
are now changing. Guyana has under one million people in an
area of 200,000 square kilometres. One third of the people
are urban and live along the coast, mainly at river ports.
The rural population is divided between agriculture along
the coast and a number of small settlements in the interior.

The University of Guyana is not part of the University of
the West Indies and does not participate in current
networking efforts in the English Caribbean. Until recently
Guyana's tropospheric scatter phone link to Trinidad would
not support data communications. The new phone system, owned
by U.S. Virgin Island based ATN, does provide basic data
transmission capabilities. For example, the Georgetown
CARICOM offices now have network links to other CARICOM
sites in the Caribbean.

Communications within Guyana remain difficult. During the
1992 general elections, the U.S. Carter Centre had to supply
radiophones to support the work of observer teams. The
University has no internal phone system. The old system
collapsed and is obsolete. One voice line and one fax line
serve the entire campus. NGO's, development projects, rural
education centres, and environmental projects in the
interior are poorly linked to Georgetown and to the world.

On the positive side, the Inter-American Development Bank
has recently completed a computer training facility on the
campus. The National Data Centre is located on campus and is
in charge of computer introduction in the Government. Guyana
has recently been visited by small networking missions from
the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), from the OAS
supported CUNet initiative from Puerto Rico, and from
Canada's York University Centre for Research on Latin
America and the Caribbean (CERLAC).

These efforts will produce networking proposals in the near
future. The proposals will probably include some satellite
based access for remote sites in Guyana's interior. Given
the situation in Guyana the likely outcome will be a
collaborative networking initiative to service the
University, institutes and the NGO community, as well as
educational initiatives and some service providers within
the Guyanese government. The network will likely be managed
by a consortium represented the various institutional users
and will have gateways and "access windows" to relevant data
sites, including government and business sites, as the two
make increasing use of networks.

Prepared by: Sam Lanfranco, Distributed Knowledge Project
             CERLAC, York University, CANADA
     e-mail: lanfran@vm1.yorku.ca

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