I Brought a Broadband Connection to a Dialup World

Even though it was more than 10 years ago, I remember the day like it was yesterday. I hooked up my new DSL modem and voila, my world was transformed from dialup to broadband. Web pages that had previously taken minutes to download now appeared in a flash. I could look at photos and videos - all of the rich content that the worldwide web had to offer spread out like a blanket before me. It was a miracle.

But over time I just got used to the high speed connection. I stopped marvelling at it...I watched television episodes, listened to radio, and uploaded gigabytes worth of photos and content, all without an ounce of appreciation for the wonders of broadband. 

And as time continued to pass, my world shifted...I’m not sure exactly when it happened, perhaps it started with the advent of social media and cloud computing, perhaps before that, but without even noticing I started becoming completely dependent upon those hair-thin fibreoptic strands. And I wasn’t alone. In the past five years the balance has shifted from dialup optimized web pages and content to sites that require a broadband connection. Dialup is now agonizingly slow.  

I know this first-hand because here at CDRN the entire organization is connected to the Internet by a dialup modem. It sits about six feet away from me, a small white box with three blinking green lights. Alfred, the head of security, comes into my office whenever a lightning storm threatens and unplugs it, cutting off Internet access to the entire office to protect the modem from power surges. It’s my responsibility to power it up on Monday mornings when I arrive. And although I share this control with Alfred, it still makes me feel a bit like a god knowing that I control the Internet*.

Curious about just how slow the Internet connection is here, I tested it this morning. I began by running broadband tests (which didn’t really work because the connection is so slow). So then I just started calling up web pages. Yahoo! took three minutes to load. YouTube loaded after five minutes, but I can’t imagine why it bothered...there is no way a video would play off of a dialup connection.  Some pages won’t even load. Facebook timed out.

Like an addict, I have become so dependent upon a broadband connection that I can’t function. I’ve switched off CDRN's network and exclusively use my iPhone wi-fi hotspot.  I wonder, though, how does CDRN cope?  When I talked with Brian Musanje, head of IT, he said that this is how most SMEs in Kampala operate. Dialup is the norm.

I expected to experience a language barrier here, but so far I haven’t, everyone speaks fluent English. I expected to accidently offend people with my agnostic religious beliefs and environmental radicalism, but again I haven't because people are extremely accommodating. What I didn’t expect though, was to encounter a dialup culture that functions just fine in the Internet slow lane.  My worldwide web is tilting sideways a bit today.
 

*Note:  Hi Mom! :-) The bold text you see on all of the pages are clickable links to additional information.

Update: I have no idea why but the Internet connection is moving along at a decent clip this afternoon (I thought I'd give it one more try). This morning it was an electronic turtle as usual, but this afternoon it was so fast that I thought I'd give broadband speed test another try...check it out - I believe this qualifies as DSL! Maybe our worlds are not so different afterall...