Orange
MTN-Orange: 1-50, Allahu Akbar
 

When 10 years ago I considered to live in Africa, mobile broadband UMTS internet was up and running in Tokyo and European mobile providers announced it coming soon. UMTS did 50 kBps (50 000 bytes per second) then and now does up to 900 kBps. I thought of my life in Africa as featuring totally hassle free mobile broadband internet, up to watching live TV, within two years. However the dot com slump and technical problems led to a prolonged employment of GPRS (max 10 kBps), GPRS even got pestered into EDGE (20kBps). But worse, African internet providers felt their customer subscription (more than twice the European tariffs!) insufficient to buy the appropriate satellite capacity for their services, and by oversubscribing their bandwidth to the backbone reduced customers to anything between 1.5 kBps and zero point zero. In Uganda, do not try to buy anything over internet! Your payment screen has frozen ten times before you are through and you will not know how many times they will charge you for buying the same thing! 8 years ago BBC world service accommodated for the situation by broadcasting workable extremely low bandwidth radio. Meanwhile BBC got a bit more ambitious concerning their sound quality and now even "low bandwidth" BBC radio has become too big a data stream for African internet users. Africa heads for collapse, everybody knows, but I had not reckoned with this degeneration of internet. Or? End of last year newspapers pictured two sea cables being drawn on the Mombassa beaches! What followed was feverish glass fiber activity, but unfortunately, the Ugandan thugs grabbing the monopoly for the network got cheated by other thugs who put the wrong glass fiber. Though in densely populated areas providers shifted to UMTS, due to the unchanged bottleneck to the backbone the customer's speed remained the same.10 years after the introduction of UMTS in Tokyo much of East Africa is still happy with any speed over 1 kBps!

But while MTN wastes billions of its mobile subscription income to irritating FIFA World Cup football spectators, Orange has arrived. Orange originates from Wanadoo France Telecom and now hosts almost 200 million subscribers world wide. In Uganda it halved the price for Orange-locked 3G modems to �50, brought fees down to roughly a third and speed up to more than 50 times that of its competitors. Finally. After 10 years. Meanwhile I had shifted from MTN (totally unworkable) to Uganda Telecom (just very bad). UTL staff gave me a month "trial subscription" with 33% reduction. Staff typed a password in my computer. That looked fishy: UTL had no such "trial" offers on its web site. I guessed the local UTL counter-workers had found a way to pocket my subscription. After the trial month I extended subscription two more months, without thinking of that password. After those two months, my internet connection stayed on without pay. I found, by asking some innocent questions, at another UTL office of course, that my password was now that of some contractors of a large building project that I know will last at least five more years. My internet is now substandard but free. Sometimes I am down a day because the contractors are late paying, but who cares!

So: now after ten years even East Africa features viable UMTS I can not shift, unless my contractors shift to Orange and my little UTL thugs fail to give "their" password to another UTL customer. I am in what economists call the poverty trap, in this case a blessing of corruption. The world is hard.

MTN-Orange: dream against reality, 1 against 50 mBps internet speed, 40 euro a month against 18.

Iguana Netherbar Kampala, preventively evacuated after three other K'la venues got bombed.  Spain scored while the public was in the jam on its way home. Calculating from the general Uganda religion statistics 10 to 15 of the victims should be, like the once generally adored Idi Amin, martyred muslems.

Also, the Orange cable got blasted, so for the coming days even Orange subscribers are back on the satellite, anything between 1.5 kBps and zero point zero