How and why the Catholic Church became a major Internet provider in Uganda.

https://www.ncronline.org/news/world/church-provides-internet-northern-uganda-connects-more-computers

The Catholic Church has become one of the major internet providers in northern Uganda built on people's needs for a reliable, innovative communications network during Joseph Kony's reign of terror in the 2000s.

Beginning in 1987, a cult leader named Joseph Kony of the Lord's Resistance Army led a campaign of terror against northern Uganda, killing more than 100,000 people and displacing two million. In the early 2000s, Lord's Resistance Army soldiers kidnapped young children and forced them to become soldiers, committing atrocities against their own villagers. [Global Sisters Report has reported on sisters helping to rehabilitate returning soldiers.]

Rebels abducted people on the roads and planted roadside bombs and landmines, making travel dangerous. The rebels learned how to hack into the radio communication that the Catholic Church used to coordinate priests traveling between parishes. Mobile phones were not widely used because the network didn't cover northern Uganda, and landlines were often down.

"This idea came into play, could we use voice over internet technology to send information that no one else could hear?" said Tonny Okwonga, who today is the Chief Operations Officer for BOSCO-Uganda, the church's internet service in northern Uganda. "The church was trying to help people get out of isolation," Okwonga explained. "Priests and catechists were getting abducted, landmines were being planted, but there was no way to send information because you couldn't travel."

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Gus Zuehlke, a catechist from Indiana who got to know Ugandan priests who were on student exchange programs at the University of Notre Dame, visited Gulu, a regional capital of a northern district of Uganda in 2003, and started exploring ways to solve the lack of communication. With the help of information technology experts, he eventually settled on a method utilizing special wireless internet (wifi) over low-frequency waves. The best places to station the wifi boxes? Radio towers, which are high above buildings.

When the low-frequency wifi boxes are in "sight" of one another, meaning no geographical masses block the signals, they can extend wifi for miles — up to 40 km (25 miles) in some cases. Because the church already has a network of radio towers in almost every diocese, they had an existing network of ready-made points to connect the wifi boxes.

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