A FRUSTRATING TALE

When we talk about network companies in this part of the world, it’s always a frustrating tale because of how bad the network is, how high the tariff is, and how fast the data consumption is. Yesterday I was at the office when the HR department called me to say that they were having network issues submitting POs to prospective clients. On reaching there I thought it was a website issue because it can’t possibly be a network issue knowing that we have a very good network that is truly unlimited. Only for me to be surprised when I discovered that it was truly a network issue.

It turned out that the website needed a network speed of approximately 1.2mbps meanwhile our network speed which I felt was high was about 0.75 - 0.85mbps. It was frustrating to tell them that there was nothing I could do and that they should just manage to wait and see if the network would come back up. Thankfully it did but didn’t last up to an hour making them go back and forth with a lot of things needed to be done. It was painful and embarrassing for me because it was one of the reasons we stopped using airtel and MTN routers which by the way are very expensive and do not give unlimited data.

We currently use an end to end fiber network that provides us with unlimited data. It is a local network company that provides better network services when it comes to browsing. They have a mast in the estate where my company is located and just like our power company, they is a wire cable from the mast distributed to all their users by the same distribution point the power company uses (a pole). Although I prefer it to the big network companies, it is still nowhere near perfect as it can be affected by the tiniest disturbance. But then again, it is what we’ve got.