oh, the joys of advancing technology?

Mid-January, Marc was told by our phone/internet provider that our nearest town, Kandi, would soon be connected to the 3G connection. He asked whether the signal would reach our village, and was told not. We weren't particularly surprised, but thought we would at least be able to go to Kandi if we needed to use a fast connection.

However, at the end of last week our 2G connection suddenly went weird. It kept cutting out, and another signal was being picked up, but not well enough to connect with. We figured out after a while that the 3G signal from Kandi was obviously just reaching us, so weakly that we couldn't connect to it, but it was messing up the 2G connection.

For several days we struggled to keep our anti-viruses up-to-date and to get our emails with a connection which was non-existent most of the time, and rarely lasted more than 5 minutes. I was worried about how Simon was going to be able to follow his on-line Spanish course if this continued. Finally Marc had a good look at the set-up of our dongle and discovered that it was possible to stop it from picking up the 3G connection. Finally we are back to "normal".

Honestly, I'm satisfied with the connection we have. It is better than it used to be, meaning that apart from some image-heavy sites, we can surf the internet well, if slowly. We can't watch videos, but I suspect that they would be more a source of time-wasting temptation than a help. It's a nice change to have 3G when we are staying in Parakou or Cotonou (and if we really need it we can always take our computers to Kandi now!) but I don't think we really need it at home.

Simon working on his Spanish: