“If you can connect up by wireless from Everest, you ought to be able to connect up anywhere”

Thus quipped a writer from the New York Times when she researched her story about the efforts Tsering Sherpa and Dave Hughes were going to make to operate the world’s highest ‘Cyber Café” at the 18,000 foot level Base Camp in May, 2003. This was to support climbers during the 50th Anniversary of the first climb of Mount Everest by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay some 50 years ago.

While that Everest Cyber Café operation made world news when all eyes were on the large number of climbers attempting the summit in May, a potentially far more significant wireless project was started in October further down at 12,000 feet in the Sherpa village of Namche Bazar. This article is about that effort to link up wirelessly, first, all the lodges and businesses in Namche – the last place where climbers and trekkers rest and acclimate themselves to the altitude before pressing on to their higher mountain goals. And then to launch the first very high country ‘distance learning’ venture for very poor Sherpa children whose education is very limited at best.