Speeding Right Along
The Internet can be a strange animal in Panama. Boquete is a small and out of the way place and things reach here less quickly than they do more urbanized parts of the country. The local phone company's monopoly contract ends this year but until then we have only two options for connectivity. Aside from the 'wired' option there is a company that for a fee will install an antenna on the roof, which thereafter for $150 a month will get you a blazing 512 kbps. The same speed ADSL service is $47 from the phone company.
We went with the phone company, being less flushed with money than pride. Immediately after the technician left I plugged the modem into the wireless router, as he refused to soil his hands with it, and the subsequent connection to the ISP was denied. A couple of phone calls later we were up and running again. Since then it's a daily or twice daily operation to call the office and get them to restore our failed connection.
Yesterday another technician came out to supposedly give us a new modem, but as we booted the system and all came online immediately he just stayed and chatted a while. As he was screwing around he loaded a speed page to see what we were getting and we were stuck around 217. He then loaded the phone company page and found we were set for 255 down and 125 up. He called the company to get us the right service and got nowhere. He left, we made a few calls and finally decided to walk up the hill to the local office and see what was up.
The nice customer service lady pointed to the phone number scrawled at the bottom of the installation contract. We explained to her our previous attempts and she finally agreed to get on the phone herself. Thirty minutes of small talk and waiting for various live people on the other end of the line later, everyone was all smiles and we took our leave. Back at the ranch we tested and were hovering around 415, which will need to be good enough for government work. I haven't tested the laptop yet.
