New Adventures in Dial-Up

We arrive in Egypt in August. Our school meets us at the gate, ushering us from the airport immediately to our school-provided flat. I am immediately grateful for so much: that the 34-hour trek from Memphis to Cairo is finished, that the school has arranged to breeze us through customs and that the internet in the flat is ready to go. Dead tired, we drop our bags, we post on Facebook, we fire off a couple of emails, and we sleep for the next 14 hours. The posts upload no problem, and the email rockets through cyber-space right away. Cloudy though my mind is at the time, I remember thinking that this is great, that we have forever waved goodbye to China-style, slow internet.

The following day we traipse through school tours. Jet lagged, we try to stay awake through a couple of orientation sessions. The guy that speaks to us about our home internet is nice but drones on and on. That much I remember.

"Blah, blah, blah, bandwidth wifi router ... blah, blah, blah, Mbps download ... blah, blah, blah data limit dial-up ... blah, blah, blah." On and on. He finishes. We awaken from our trances, and we sign the papers he wants us to sign. That much I remember.

November is our first full month here in Cairo. Given generous school breaks, we have enjoyed long weekends or week-long holidays in both September and October. And we have taken those opportunities to travel. When in Rome ... The point is that we have yet to be resident in Cairo for an entire month. Sure at the end of September and October, I notice a couple of days where the internet is really slow. But it is Egypt, right? Given that we experience weekly, rolling brown-outs, times when the electricity shuts off for about an hour, I should expect there to be times when the internet is a little sluggish.  So I really do not think anything odd about the end-of-the-month sluggishness until mid-November.

Then it hits. On November 12^th I notice that the internet is remarkably slow. And it is slow on the 13^th and then on the 14^th, too. So I ask at school.

"Ah, that'll be your data limit," says John, a Liverpudlian and tech guru.

Data limit? Nobody told me about a data limit.

Then it clicks. Our first full day in Cairo and the blah, blah, blah internet dude droning on and on. We signed papers. We agreed to ... the dreaded data limit.

Today, I am not certain what our actual limit is. I do know that the data cycle runs from from month to month and is calculated on the last week of every month. I know that this month we blazed through our data limit by the 12^th. I also know that after a household has exceeded the data limit, the internet speed of said household drops down to {gulp!} dial-up. I know that I have spent two of the longest weeks of my life trying to struggle against the brutal pain of plodding download speeds. I now know that I would rather eat shards of glass than suffer creeping, idle internet. This much I know.

I now have a few other nuggets of knowledge. Thanks to a lovely, little iPad app, I know that we normally enjoy a 1.1 Mbps average download speed here at the flat. This is four to five times faster than our connection to the slow-net in China but four times slower than our high-speed hookup in Memphis. Not great, but better than the snail's pace of China and not bad for a developing nation in North Africa. This much, I expected.

But dial-up is something different. Dial-up is old school like your grand-pappy's internet. Like it was back in the day when email was a revolution. With dial-up, you can watch the code slowly unfurl to reveal one small image, line by painful line. With dial-up, your mind fills in the oceans of silence with the babbling cacophony that modems used to emit. With dial-up, you can cook dinner and eat it while waiting for that website you really wanted to see to load. It may or may not be fully up by the time you finish the dishes.

Within a couple of days after the 12^th, I shake off the hypnotic lethargy associated with watching the spinning-circle animation of a website loading to get the problem sorted out. I find the number of another internet service provider that can install DSL cable in the flat. I am on the phone for at least an hour, but I finally reach a customer service agent who speaks English. Yes, DSL can be arranged for our address, and yes, we can purchase a plan with unlimited data. It is even reasonably well priced (for us ... not the rest of the country)! Success!

There is a slight catch, though. The next available time slot for an installation crew to swing by is in March.