Up in the sky

Zipping along the highways and byways across America, I enjoy reading the signs motels post out front to get your business. 

Inn-Room Coffee! Free HBO! Air Conditioned! Free Breakfast!

And now, soon the join the list of vacation spots touting their freebies:

Free high-speed internet service!

And that's not the Shak-A-Way Motel offering a www.hookup, no sir.

It's Mount Kilimanjaro!

Yes, thanks to modern technology, mountain climbers ascending Africa's tallest mountain can get their bearings and navigate to the peak just by looking at their phones.

And it goes without saying, they can also post their smiling selfies to Instagram and check the baseball scores and read the comics and horoscope.  It's all there.

It's courtesy of the state-owned Tanzania Telecommunications Corporation, which set up a broadband network 12,200 feet up in the air. They promise to have connectivity at the very tip top of the 19,300-foot mountain by the end of the year.

"Today ... I am hoisting high-speed INTERNET COMMUNICATIONS (BROADBAND) on the ROOF OF AFRICA," Nape Nnauye, the minister for information, communication and information technology, tweeted last week. "Tourists can now communicate worldwide from the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro."

There are two good things coming from this: it will be a boon for tourism as well as for safety of the climbers. 

Mr. Nnauye acknowledges that it was previously "a bit dangerous" up there with no internet service. And this is not a handful of people: tourism officials figure that 35,000 people attempt to summit* Kilimanjaro each year. About a third of them turn back due to altitude sickness and sudden onsets of good sense.

Over in Nepal, Mount Everest has 4G internet and fiber-optic broadband.

Predictably enough, there is homefront controversy about Tanzania doing this. Less than 45% of Tanzania is covered by cell reception, so people accuse the government of putting the tourists' needs over those of the locals. 

And people all over the world hear that and say, "And...?"

* I am efforting to find out just how and when "summit" became a verb. I'm having trouble languaging again.