Dialing up to access the web can be very challenging – especially in PNG!

Last week I decided to get myself an Internet account with one of the major ISP in PNG. I think I should not mention the name of that particular company. The young lady at the front desk gave us our user name and password and I hurried home, excited to access the web right from my living room. Boy was I in for a shocker!!

Firstly, they forgot to give me the dial up number. When I asked my missus, she replied, “the young lady said just use your telephone number”. And I thought, hang on. This can’t be right. How can I be dialing my own number to access the web via the ISP server? So I asked my missus the second, and third and fourth and several more times – are you sure you heard correctly? That we have to dial our own phone number? This must have gone on for some time because we ended up arguing. Anyway, we decided to stop trying and front up at the ISP to get more information. I had a really depressing weekend because I was really looking forward to write more regularly for my blog, right from the comfort of my home.

And sure enough on Monday when we went back to the ISP to enquire, they apologized and gave us not one but 5 different numbers to dial up to get to the web. I also later found out that I could not access the Internet from my phone line because it was not a STD line. So I have resorted to carrying my laptop to wherever there is an STD phone line to access my blog.

If this was not enough, the dial service is very slow. The package offered by the ISP is such that I have to buy time. Much like buying prepaid mobile phone cards. You just buy the number of hours you want to on the net and each time you access the web, the hours get subtracted.

I have now realized that the dial up service is very slow. So slow that when I decided to download a document sent by a friend in my email, the download process was going to take 1 day, 22 hours and 25 minutes. I was thinking, “will this download take 2 full days?”