Kids’ Doc in Jos

It’s funny how expectations change over time and how contentment is related to expectations. When we came to Nigeria 17 years ago, it was difficult and costly to make an international phone call.You had to call a number in another city t o book an international call. When you finally got through, they would try to call you back and make the connection. Then, for a while, we had to go to the phone company offices to make a call. When we first got email in around 1993, people had to pay about $0.50 for every message of a page of text. The connection was made by modem on an international phone call from the SIM office in the US to our house in Nigeria every night, and a special, high quality modem was needed because of the poor line quality. We printed out people’s messages, or put them onto floppy discs, and delivered them personally. If they got their mail once a week or so, they were happy.

Now things have changed. New missionaries arrive from the US and other countries where the internet and other communication services are everywhere and are cheap–almost free. Internet connections here have improved although the cost is still high. Now, for some people, being cut off from the internet and email for a few hours becomes a problem. Whereas once it was enough to get text email now and then, now people want to use Skype and even video Skype … all over a super-expensive satellite connection. Part of my new job as computer systems coordinator at SIM Nigeria is managing those expectations and trying to keep the connections running smoothly.

My big challenge in the past week has been dealing with the internet connections in the SIM headquarters and Evangel Hospital. In both places, our connection is over a satellite dish (VSAT), and is shared among about 50 users at each site. Until recently, we had relatively slow connections and just lived with them, since VSAT is quite expensive. The entire connection for 50 computers at Evangel Hospital, for example, was slower during business hours than a single home connection (ISDN) in the US.

Because of some reorganization in our provider (MWEB), including their changing to another satellite, the company switched everyone to new plans. They gave us, at Evangel and SIM, plans that provided dedicated bandwidth rather than channels shared with 32 other customers, as we had before. At the same time, though, they limited our monthly usage to very small amounts (1.5 and 4.5 GB respectively). So, it’s as if we have a bigger trough to feed from, but are supposed to be eating less. We didn’t know this (an email was sent out but apparently never got to anyone who understood or acted on it) until last week when MWEB sent out a notice that we have been exceeding our allocation–by a factor of 10 in the case of Evangel!

I’ve been busy, then with checking into different companies and different plans, trying to track which users are consuming the gigabytes and on what sites, trying to restrict the use somewhat by blocking some sites, and so on. The plans that will give us what we need cost in the range of $1000 per month, still for a connection that would cost only $20 or so in the US! We’ll have to go ahead and swallow the bitter pill and pass along the cost to the people who are using the connections, but it’s going to be a particularly bitter pill when they see the service level decrease at the same time as the costs double.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 11:59 am and is filed under Mike's jottings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.