If there was one thing plaguing Mauritius at the moment, excluding the high inflation, unemployment, social troubles, dissatisfaction and strange sea waves of 4 metres high, it would be SLOW INTERNET CONNECTION!

I was getting at least 55KBps with my 512Kbps connection, at off-peak hours like at the time I'm posting this. Instead? I'm getting 7-8 KBps connections! When I open 2 sections, speed painfully climbs to 16KBps! What the hell!!
Usually, with only 1 section, speed comfortably goes to 55KBps. And I don't take $h1t like the server is slow or anything. I'm sure the server is a fast one. I'm used to downloading from it.

The problem, according to me is that the Mauritian network is saturated and since international bandwidth on the SAFE cable is impossibly difficult and expensive to buy, we are stuck with snail-like speeds.

I can agree that during the day, businesses get priority over home users in terms of speed. I don't care what happens during the day, which is peak hours. But even at 20h pm you still get slow speeds?? What the hell are you doing Mr. ISP Admin??
Come on! We are paying the full price of our connection, at least give us our full speed during off-peak if you can't guarantee during the day!

Now time for some trivia:

- I phoned my ISP regarding this slowness some time back. There was no problems with my PC or my phone line. They told me "We can't guarantee the international bandwidth during the day. All international companies are actively using the SAFE cable and thus the speed degrades". I don't understand 2 things. My ISP paid for a fixed amount of bandwidth on the cable. How come people are invading this bandwidth? Even if all other INTERNATIONAL companies are using the cable, they should be using their own portion. How come we get slow speeds here, in our fixed amount of bandwidth.

Second explanation, the server being international is saturated and slow. Ok, I can digest that. But tell me. If I launch 5 simultaneous downloads. And if I get 10KBps for each, assuming all the servers are saturated and busy. The total should give me 5x10KBps = 50KBps total speed. During the day, International bandwidth cannot be guaranteed, but I believe I'm still entitled to my 512K connection pipeline right? So how come my 5 downloads don't add up to 50K?? How come I cannot get past the 20K mark? Strange strange!

- According to some other people, the next major development in Internet connections in Mauritius will be after the introduction of the ESSAY cable around 2009. What do we do till then? Go figure.

- My ISP says there is general slowness on the network for the time being. They don't know what's causing it. Go figure by yourself and enjoy your slowness while they fix it.

Personally, I think the network is at it's limit and it's time for some upgrades. However, since the market is small (50K less customers or so), the cost of upgrades is too much and the price of the services will go skyhigh and customers will resign their accounts. So what's the point of upgrading if everybody goes away because of high costs?

I leave the discussion here. More info and feedback later. I hope the situation gets better till next Monday. If so, new post! :D