For anyone who lives in Guyana and uses the internet regularly, GT&T teased us for a few weeks with what was to come, a brand new internet experience! They promised that from the 1st of July 2010, we would have four times the current (advertised) bandwidth on our DSL connections, most of us use a 256kbps connection so that meant a whopping 1Mbps.
Most of us, never having experienced anything like this, since we are all local born, bred and grown, with little or no exposure to the internet beyond our shores, were ecstatic with just the thought of it, some of us probably went to bed on June 30th drooling with anticipation.
I have heard people compare our DSL connection to being slower than what they get as dial-up in the cities of North America, I can’t vouch for that, but yes, it was slow. I once thought that internet error messages were designed with a Guyanese connection in mind, but surely we’re not the only ones suffering such a fate. During my growing years, I was always told that somewhere in the world there are people worse off than I am, and that is true. I have a home (mortgaged), a job that I like, a family that I love, I earn enough to feed and cloth myself and enjoy a few of the things offered in life, and I have access to the World Wide Web. So I have to thank the telephone company for at least that.
Anyway, I digress! GT&T and the Internet! On July 1, 2010 I eagerly went into work, and like most Guyanese, the first thing I did at the computer was to check the all new awesome speed! and it seems that GT&T hit the proverbial brick wall (not the one on the left).
Not only was the browsing definitely not faster, it was actually slower, across Facebook (in the Guyanese community anyway) there was joke after joke about the service (or lack of), it even escalated to attacks on the source of the new Emagine Logo and mascot. I admit, I was part and parcel of all this, because we were all justifiably angry. I don’t think I ever saw so much plays on the word “imagine”
The lesson to be learnt, is never ever ever promise something you can’t deliver. You can’t say that on July 1st there’s be a newer and faster internet experience and then not deliver. And when you don’t deliver, you have people (PR) make various excuses and hastily contrived explanations and justifications. One individual claimed that they were “phasing it in”. Nonsense! you want to deliver on the promise of a faster internet that you will “phase in” the it should have been phasing in from a few days before so that you don’t make the entire company look like they’re incompetent.
The good news is, they’re ironing out the kinks, getting rid of the bugs and giving us a better service, so that I can actually upload more than one photo a day to my site 🙂
The three photos in this blog were all uploaded today, quite a milestone for me, since it was so much a hassle before, with failed uploads and just tying up the bandwidth 🙂 Now I have to go back through the older items in my catalog and finally do some processing and uploading, the new available bandwidth is giving me more work 🙂
Emagine. I was fairly busy today and still uploaded three images, Emagine the possibilities for the future 🙂
The Michael Lam Collection's Blog 
And now I can finally browse those photos.
Mike, this is just how they want you to feel. Don’t be fooled 🙂
Seriously though, we are in the third world, we don’t expect first world service ’cause it just ain’t gonna happen.
What I don’t like (and take great offense at) is the idea of after years of paying rates that are significantly higher than the first world we are supposed to feel grateful to the beneficent phone company.
Yes, we should say thanks. Just like we say thanks to any cashier who takes our money to give us a service or good. But that thanks should be tempered with the consideration that we are still paying inflated rates, we just aren’t getting shafted quite as badly as we were before.
LOL Mike.. some are still waiting to emagine. I do agree this phasing in should have started before the deadline. and in the technological world I would have to say at least 2 weeks in advance just to minimize on the bugs, errors that usually pop up during any implementation phase….