The introduction of the Internet to Nepal began in August 1994, spearheaded by Sanjay Manandhar, a former Senior Software Engineer at Siemens Nixdorf in the United States.
Manandhar partnered with SatelLife, a nonprofit organization, based in Cambridge, MA, USA, offering access to low-Earth orbit satellite technology.
Although the satellite provided limited bandwidth (90 KB every 90 minutes), Manandhar supplemented this with a sophisticated modem, the Telebit Worldblazer, capable of functioning around noisy international phone lines.
To ensure sustainability, Manandhar formed a Steering Committee to manage HealthNet as a nonprofit Internet Service Provider (ISP).
Later in 1994, Sanjay Manandhar collaborated with Sanjib Rajbhandari, a fellow-alumnus of St. Xavier’s School, Kathmandu, to fully operationalize Mercantile Office Systems (MOS) as an ISP.
Manandhar also considered additional ventures, such as a fax gateway service, which leveraged cost differences between local and international communications to provide businesses with a cost-effective solution.
By March 1995, having established two ISPs and the fax gateway company, Manandhar decided to return to the West, leaving Nepal’s nascent Internet industry to continue its growth.
The pioneering work of Sanjay Manandhar and his collaborators laid the groundwork for the expansion of Internet services in Nepal, transforming communication and access to information in the country.
[2] From October 2006 through January 2007, the OpenNet Initiative conducted testing on six Nepali ISPs (Worldlink, Everest, Mercantile, Nepal Telecom, Speedcast, and Websurfer) to detect possible Internet filtering (censorship).