Especially to my South African friends, this is not intended to make you jealous, but merely to share my disbelief and disillusionment with South African broadband.

I popped into Starbucks for a quick coffee (or espresso?) while waiting for a friend of mine. As I had my MacBook with me, I thought I’d quickly abuse the hotspot. Switch on, connects automatically to the T-mobile site, and it gives me certain options for paying (not free, unfortunately). So I pay my 10 pounds for 24 hour pass. This gives me a total of 24 hours on the Internet whenevr I feel like it.

After connecting, I quickly download Firefox (16Mb in less than 5 mins). I also do an OS X update which is about 10 Mb, and this takes me about 3 minutes. Put another way, I downloaded at about 30K per second. The nearly 30Mb was downloaded before I could finish my espresso.

Talk about a fast coffeeshop.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 20th, 2006 at 14:09 @548 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.