Follow enough Romanians on Twitter and it becomes all too apparent all too quickly that unreliable internet connections are one of the great gripes of the country’s twittering classes. There is little point in Romania having the fourth fastest average internet connection in the world (true: read more here) if you can’t use it for hours at a time. It’s like having a fast car you can’t drive at anything like its full speed because of the awful state of the roads. (So not the kind of problem people around Bucharest would know anything about).
Yet the reason that internet connections keep coming and going in Bucharest is not complex, or highly technical. No. There is a very simple reason internet connections come and go: it’s because the city’s cable so-called infrastructure is falling down.
This – for example – is (or was) and probably will be again somebody’s internet connection:
Yesterday however it was just a load of cable strung across a busy pavement (outside Tineretului metro station) that nobody appeared to have any great desire to pick up and repair.
Scenes like this are common. In the Tineretului area alone we were yesterday able to take these pictures of Bucharest’s cable infrastructure:
We of course use the term ‘infrastructure’ loosely. The companies that own it do not. One of our favourite moments of the past year was the boss of a cable company boasting of his firm’s investment in this infrastructure, as though slinging some cables from tree to tree took barrel loads of cash, special skills and know-how.
For some time we were ourselves reliant on a muppet-run organisation for our internet. The cable that delivered us a fairly quick (when it worked) connection was slung from a tree to a garage roof, then over a car park and in through the window of the kitchen. All very hi-tech. It used to go down (quite literally) at least once a week, usually because a lorry or tall van had been into the car park and cut it. It would then take hours for a highly trained brigada de interventie (usually a couple of tataie with duck tape and super glue) to come and sort it out.
In the end we saw the light and signed up with Romtelecom. Using existing telephone lines (which are still basically wires strung from pillar to post, just strung in a far better way) the service never goes down. We instead have other gripes with Romtelecom, mainly their refusal to take more money from us.
We have said before that the one thing which – more than any other – gives Bucharest that Third World-look is the amount of overhead cables the city has. And though we hear that they are being buried in some areas of the city, progress is slow, even for Romania. Those of you still using cable internet should expect plenty of down time for the foreseeable future.
(Hopefully not until you’ve finished reading this of course).
