Africa bandwidth

I have been in East Africa for a week, attending the global 24:14 consultation. While here, being the Internet user that I am, I noted:

Bandwidth is thin. There was enough mostly for email. Facebook and Twitter were far more problematic. I was able to use video like YouTube and Netflix rarely and with frequent stops. Any high bandwidth function was challenging.

Bandwidth was quickly eaten up. There were high use times where you could practically forget getting on.

Bandwidth was fragile. The first day I arrived, access to the Internet was out at our hotel and, inasmuch as I could learn, a large area around it. It took three days to restore it. I don’t know why but I didn’t see workers in the area until the third day. The upshot of these limits is: while communications with coworkers and partners are possible, the kind of communications we take for granted in areas of greater Internet deployment should not be taken for granted here.

Thick files, large videos, podcast audio, the cloud, and so on are difficult. They are not 24/7/365 near instant features of life. We should bear this in mind.