In some ways, I am a very patient man.

“Hurry up, I need it now!” strategies have little chance of success in places such as PNG where you are up against the triple curses of turtle-paced introduction of world-wide available technology, anticompetitive pressures of vested interests, and a pervasive cultural attitude that the situation is hopeless and we may as well ‘do what we can’ and not complain.

When I become impatient to the point of pushiness is when my co-workers and (yikes!) my bosses begin to wonder if I know anything about what I am doing. (I sometimes wonder myself.)

The most irritating and common complaint that I have directed toward me is that people simply cannot do their work without a reliable internet connection, which they don’t have. How can I respond to this? “Sorry” just doesn’t do it anymore.

In today’s world, this is a complaint that cannot be dismissed by saying, “I’m doing the best that I can.” You simply must find a better way.

At my office, the combination of Telikom’s ever decaying capability to provide reliable service and our ISP’s apparent inability to do anything to improve the situation has led me to this: 

That’s right. I can get more done at my house with a ten year old dialup modem on my very messy desk (maxing out at 28.8KBS) than I can at my office on a leased line costing thousands of Kina a month.

For the icing on the cake – I have to get my emailing done before 8:00 AM or forget it.

To me, this seems shameful. The funny bit (in the tragic sense) is that nobody seems to be ashamed of it.

Teiikom certainly shows no indications of apology or even acknowledgement of care of duty. Like PNG Power, the attitude, over time, has decayed to the point that the model is no longer continuous, reliable service. The model now is “count yourself lucky when we give it to you and don’t complain when we don’t.”

As an example (we’ll give Telikom a rest for a moment), when we first came to Madang, power outages were rare occurrences. We might experience a brief outage a couple of times a month on the average. Now we are experiencing many blackouts a day!

Getting back to Telikom, there is always a perfectly perplexing excuse why the throughput is so glacial. It is a new excuse every day. It seems that Telikom’s slogan is truer than we might desire. “Telikom – Always There” sounds catchy and hip. But, where we need it is here, not there!

The ISPs blame it all, of course, on Telikom. While this may be true in some respects, the ISPs seem happy to accept payments that are shameful by world standards for service that is ridiculous by the same standards while offering no alternative solutions themselves.

Telikom offers a VSAT (that’s a satellite dish that communicates directly with a geosynchronous satellite) that will give the customer broadband service. However the price is absurd – wait, absurd is not strong enough. When asked if they will offer anything for actual businesses that have a responsibility to act in a fiscally responsible manner (meaning not pounding money down a rat hole) the answer seems to be, “Maybe – someday.”

Our ISP (which out of kindness I will not name) offers no alternative VSAT solution.

But that is not the end of the story.

Telikom is actively suppressing new technology such as VSAT. Please don’t take my word for it. Try to get one from someone else. The song and dance routine will put you in stitches first. This will be followed shortly by a crying jag.

And there is more! Our ISP issues veiled threats that our purchase of a VSAT from a (non Telikom) PNG supplier is illegal and we will have multiple unspecified but supposedly scary problems if we purchase one.

The vendor of said VSAT equipment says that they have the legal situation in hand and there is no problem. They are happy to take our money with a smile and a promise that we will not have our equipment unceremoniously ripped out by enraged Telikom technicians. This promise is not offered in writing, mind you.

Smiles, handshakes, veiled threats, vague promises of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? Who can you believe?

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but these kinds of shenanigans will raise suspicions in any reasonable person’s mind.

What is going on here?

My only option is to join the revolution.

Do you need a speedy, reliable internet connection to operate? Do you want to help man the barricades?

Call me, I’ll tell you how!

(DISCLAIMER: I freely admit that I am not aware of many details of what is going on concerning this situation. If I am incorrect or misinformed or even (horrors) disrespectful in any manner in this post, please, oh please, by all that’s good and fine and true, email to me a rebuttal and I promise that I will post it here. That would be more honourable that just bad-mouthing me.)