Web Woes

Nigerian ISPs have been a frequent blog topic and now I understand why. Since I arrived, I had been waiting on a particular company to install our "faster" connection. It's been about a month and a half and they only just installed on Tuesday, this is after many frustrating calls from my father, and listening to stories of their dishes being on some container that needs to clear or, them looking for one signature or the other to release equipment or, all their engineers being occupied because they were upgrading from one standard to another, I mean these people are very creative story tellers... Anyway finally they installed and so far I have been pleased with their service.

Now, while we were waiting on these first guys to install, we decided to get "broadband" service from another company that is relatively new on the scene. Their sales people were rather prompt in coming to collect their checks and promised to install within 72 hours, they installed within 96 hours instead, not bad considering I had been waiting 5 weeks for the other guys. Then after they installed everything was fine for the first day and then things came to a grinding halt the next day, the speed really really slowed down, I mean I might as well have been using a dial-up connection complete with modem sound effects. Again the endless cycle of phone calls started, "oh ....we mistakenly put you on the wrong plan, we will upgrade your account, try again in 30 minutes...",..."oh...it's still not fast? ok try again on Monday..." on Monday, "oh ok, disconnect from your router connect directly and try again"....I was supposed to try again today but I've given up, maybe over the weekend when I don't have much to do, I'll give it a try.

So presently we have 3 connections in the house, the original one which was here when I came, main problem with that one was that we were constantly losing connection and had to call them, each time I called, the lady at the other end would put me on hold (and I mean just put the phone face down on her desk or something, no hold music, hell... no mute button) and shout in yoruba to some Taiwo to restart the router. The Swift connection, which is anything but swift and the DOPC VSAT connection which is actually quite good so far but "fades" when it rains.