Internet Woes

My home Internet connection got cut off today - Vodafone Egypt have not delivered the bill since I signed up with them in November and consequently my connection has been cut off for non-payment. As to why the Vodafone Egypt have not managed to deliver the bill - it is impossible to discover, since they had my home address and the postman knows me.

Anyways, I had to go to the Internet cafe to try to get a Skype connection to tell my wife that I was having troubles with the Internet. There is an Internet cafe quite close to my house. I went in and asked how fast the connection was. The owner said "Oh, very fast!" I asked what the actual speed of it was. "2Mbit" - he said. "That is not fast. That is barely enough for a descent conversation over Skype." - I said. "Oh, no. This is very fast," - the owner insisted. When I got to the computer, I realised that the owner did not tell me the whole story - next to the computer was an internet switch, splitting the connection between 16 different computers in the cafe. End result - I got a "timed out" message while trying to open "google.co.uk". Skype was not even a possibility.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with the representatives of the Institute before I came over here. I was asking whether it was possible to get a fast Internet connection in Egypt. One gentleman got somewhat upset, telling me that I was coming to Egypt, not some backward country, and that Egypt was a leader in technology in the Middle East. Of course they had fast Internet connections. And in any case, he said, I could always use the Internet connection in the Institute, which was fast enough. I should have asked what his definition of "fast" was - the actual connection speed in the Institute is 100 KBits per second. That is about slightly more than double the speed of a dial-up connection. "Leader in technology" indeed...