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Australian desert deluge demonstrates why we're doing it

Willowra's cut off by a rogue tropical storm

It rained in central Australia last week.

And in Willowra, the remote community we visited to figure out what happens when the Internet comes to town and performed a Windows 7 upgrade, it rained so much that last Saturday the town got three times its mean monthly rainfall. And that was on top of Friday's rain, which doubled the monthly mean, and Thursday's 27.8mm which was a mm or two over a month's worth of rain.

The rain came from a tropical depression that made its way south and dumped all over central Australia. In Alice Springs, the Todd River flowed, replacing the usually-sandy bed with a flood that claimed the life of a local who surfed it on an inflated inner tube.

As we've previously reported, Willowra's a pretty isolated spot. So we don't know if the Lander River that passes the town is in flood. Our contacts there aren't responding to email, which isn't a reason to panic: they may just be on holidays.

But we do know the one road into the town is closed. That means even the nearest settlement – Ti Tree, 140km distant – is inaccessible and likely will be for days or weeks.

We won't labour the point but you probably see where we're going next: our plan to help the Wirliyajarrayi Learning Centre to get the most out of its satellite internet connection isn't just a warm fuzzy. Willowra's a community that is sometimes literally cut off from the world.

In the coming weeks and months, we'll explain how we plan to make its data connection as robust as possible.

To do so we're trying to figure out a bit more about the local network, specifically just how traffic is tunnelled to the outside world. We know that all the PCs in the Learning Centre use a WiFi router that directs data through a content filtering company. What we don't know is just how it gets to the content filter. Once our friends are in contact, we'll help them to explore that situation.

For now, we're keeping an eye on the weather to get a feel for what kind of 4WD we'll need to rent on future visits. In the past we've rented soft-roaders. Maybe we need to go the full Land Cruiser next time. ®

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