Transition Difficulty #1: Internet (Written on Thursday, August 23rd)

John started researching internet options in Harare months ago.  And now we’ve been here for over two weeks and we still haven’t resolved how we are going to meet our internet needs.  There are many options (ADSL, WiMax, Dongle, and Fiber), but they are expensive and unreliable so it’s quite tricky to make a decision.  Part of what's tricky about it is that the service you end up with is affected by where you live.  So, just because someone else has a good solution, it doesn't necessarily mean it would be a good solution on our property.

To at least get up and running with something at home I went out and purchased a device called a dongle.  This inserts into a USB port in the computer and then uses the cell phone technology to access the internet.  I don’t understand this stuff very well, but I do know that I’ve been trying to be careful about how much uploading and downloading I’ve been doing and we went through $50 worth of service in a week.  No phone calls (we use our internet for US phone calls), no Youtube, no looking at news and still it costs a lot (it’s a pay for usage system). 

Obviously this won’t work in the long run, so we have gone over all the other options about a hundred times.  The local people seem to use ADSL but it uses the copper phone lines which haven’t been taken care of in years.  At first, it wasn’t even an option since we didn’t have a local phone line that worked.  The phone company actually got that functioning on Monday and so we thought we might go with ADSL since the start up costs are lower, but then we found out that we need to sign a one year contract.  Since we’re not confident that the service will be reliable we didn’t want to lock into that.

As I type, I’m supposed to be working on checking out the options for WiMax (for this they install a small tower at our house).  This is a service that most embassy families seem to use, but we’ve gotten two sets of information from the company that we think is best and I need to access the internet to find it and ask the rep about the differences.  Lo and behold, the dongle connection won’t work right now, so I am writing this little entry instead!  Hopefully we will get this resolved soon and I’ll be feeling like I’m fully back in touch with the wide world out there.

Saturday update:  Well, I did finally get to research that WiMax option and it turned out to be a disappointment (it had pretty big limitations for daytime usage).  So, we decided on going with fiber, which will take a little longer to install, but hopefully be a reliable, fast enough solution!  It will still be at least a week, maybe two, before I can post photos, but I’m glad that we at least made a decision.