Bucharest Life » Web & Internet

Bucharest is falling down

Craig Turp — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 05:50:14 +0000

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).

Romtelecom Clicknet: Customer service fail

Craig Turp — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 12:47:28 +0000

Incredible.

Just days after we were singing their praises, Romtelecom’s excellent internet service Clicknet has let us down. Very badly.

Not, we hasten to add, in terms of the internet connection itself. There can be no doubt that Clicknet supplies the most reliable internet service in Romania. This is not the issue.

The issue is one of customer service.

A year or so ago, happy with the service we get from Clicknet (both at home and at the office) we renewed our contract with them for another two years. At the time, we wanted an 8Mbps connection. We were told that the connection speed in our area did not warrant an 8Mbps subscription: the maximum speed we could expect was 6Mbps.

We admired the sales person’s honesty. It could have been easy to have kept shtum and sold us the 8Mbps subscription.

Last week we contacted Clicknet to see if the situation had changed, to see if a faster speed was now available in our area.

We were told it was; that speeds of 10Mbps were now possible in our area. Great, we thought, and said, in best Captain Piccard style: ‘Make it so.’

That’s when the problems began.

Apparently, we can’t upgrade until our current contract expires. That’s right: we can’t upgrade.

Actually, we can, they said, but only if we pay a penalty for ending our current contract early. A penalty!

(That’s right, you read that correctly: in order to get a faster (and, we assume, more expensive) connection we would have to pay a penalty).

We hung up on Clicknet.

They phoned back, immediately, and said ‘we got cut off.’

‘No,’ we said, ‘we did not get cut off. We hung up on you.’

This time they did not ring back.

That’s us out of business then…

Craig Turp — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 07:48:50 +0000

Romanian media slam plans to curb freedoms

The Associated Press
Wednesday, March 18, 2009

BUCHAREST, Romania: Media freedom groups criticized Romanian government plans that would allow people to sue for libel on behalf of the dead.

The groups said draft legislation would limit press freedoms amid a continuing struggle between journalists and authorities since Romania threw off communism 20 years ago. Some journalists have had hundreds of libel cases lodged against them.

Measures proposed include obliging news organizations to print or broadcast an unedited “right to reply” within three days to anyone offended by an article. If they did not they would risk legal action.

The law also allows for assets owned by the press to be confiscated, destroyed or withdrawn from circulation to pay damages.

Three Romanian groups and the European Federation of Journalists on Tuesday all criticized the draft law as an attack on the press.

“Some of the proposals put forward by the government are simply absurd,” said the federation’s president Arne Koenig.

The legislation proposed by the Justice Ministry last week needs to be approved by lawmakers.

Good, original Romanian start-ups

Craig Turp — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 08:00:01 +0000

Talking last week to friends who are far more clued up in the world of technology than we are, Romania was spoken of very highly as a source of both programmers and ideas. The former we knew, the latter… hmmm. Not so sure.

There are successful Romanian start-ups all over the place (Trilulilu, Best Jobs etc.) but these are little more than local versions of somebody else’s idea.

Does anyone know of any genuinely original and financially successful Romanian start-ups? We heard something called UberVu mentioned, but that sounds more like a name somebody thought clever than something that will conquer the world. Taking a look at ubervu.com, besides the fact that we haven’t a clue what it is meant to actually do, it seems the project is still in ‘Private Beta’ (why can’t they just say it is being tested? Why the need for such bullshit language?) so can hardly be labelled a success yet.

Anyone know any others?

A New Low for Romanian Journalism

Craig Turp — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:53:12 +0000

Sorry to go on, and on, and on, but a headline we saw today defied belief…

How inconsiderate can these dead people be? Did they not realise their deaths would stop Mutu from travelling to Amsterdam?

‘Five Dead at Amsterdam Airport; Adi Mutu Can’t Fly to Amsterdam’. It appears on the website of www.sport.ro, a sports broadcaster, Sport.ro (known as ‘No Sport.ro’ for the fact that it shows very little actual sport), owned by Pro TV.

Adi Mutu is a footballer.