Internet access yesterday

Julien,

To be fair, Internet access on the island has been pretty reliable for me overall - this coming from an American ex-pat who lives and works on the web 24x7. In fact, I can count on one hand the number of times that an outage disrupted my workflow in the past year - and most of those ended up being related to a lingering physical problem at the local pole (damaged wires from CEB tree cutting operations).

By contrast, my "state of the art" 20Mbps digital cable connection in the U.S. is almost unusable. Whenever we visit our home in Palm Beach we can expect at least several days of random outages and lack of connectivity. The same can be said for electrical - the Mauritian power grid has been rock solid compared to the "brown-out" plagued excuse for service that is Florida Power & Light (water is another issue - but even the U.S. is suffering from drought these days).

So while I found yesterday's outage annoying (and praised the ceiling that it didn't happen today when I have an online meeting with clients in NYC), I put it all in perspective and marvel at how little I've had to complain about my digital lifeline.

Note: I live in Beau-Bassin, which is fairly well-developed in terms of infrastructure. Obviously, YMMV depending on how far out in the "sticks" you live.

RCK

From defimedia.com!


Télécommunications : le pays privé d’Internet pendant plusieurs heures

    * Published Yesterday

Mercredi, 20 juillet. Une panne générale sur un serveur de Mauritius Telecom a perturbé la connexion Internet à travers le pays pendant cinq heures. C’est finalement aux alentours de 16 h 30 que la connexion a été rétablie.


You should just have enjoyed the break mate ;-)

Relatively nothing done yesterday!

Had the same problem! No connection during the whole day.

Well..welcome to the CYBER ISLAND!!!

Am I blind ? Not even a short apology on Orange.mu as if it never happened?

Will they give a 100rs discount to all the companies on the next bill in order to compensate the financial loss ?

Julien don't expect anything.

They charged me for an advert I never posted on orange.mu and I've not received anything yet in terms of refund..after more than 18 months.

That being said, if you owe them Rs.100, well it will accumulate on every month's bill till it adds up to 4 figures!!

When does the govt ever apologise for their shortcomings anyway!

We had the same issue at St Antoine yesterday, I work on line all day so it was very annoying.  We don't lose connection very often but our connection is incredibly slow. Aparently we are too far from the exchange, we are only 3klm's from Goodlands. The slow connection drives me to distraction.

Julien wrote:

Am I blind ? Not even a short apology on Orange.mu as if it never happened?

Will they give a 100rs discount to all the companies on the next bill in order to compensate the financial loss ?

http://www.orange-business.mu/pdfs/term … s_adsl.pdf

17.2 is probably want you want.  Basically the answer seems to be no.

I believe that Emtel WiMax service provides guarantees on the quality of service, so that might be worth looking into.

stephenn wrote:

I believe that Emtel WiMax service provides guarantees on the quality of service, so that might be worth looking into.

WiMax isn't better!

Is anyone finding that it's still really slow? i.e somethings not been right since it went down?

I found the download speeds to be slow today.. though the reliability is better... They have the monopoly, but have to match up to the required services!!

Have been told tomorrow all will be fine.

http://www.islandcrisis.net/2010/04/mau … than-ever/

Mauritius ranks between 140 to 150 th out of 168 countries for broadband connection speed.  netindex.com/download/2,134/Mauritius

Mauritius has not only one of the slowest, but also, the most expensive per Mbps cost of broadband in the world.

What a Cyberisland dude..!

nantube wrote:

Mauritius ranks between 140 to 150 th out of 168 countries for broadband connection speed.  netindex.com/download/2,134/Mauritius

Mauritius has not only one of the slowest, but also, the most expensive per Mbps cost of broadband in the world.

What a Cyberisland dude..!

Simply put, technology and its usage is so slow around here.

I know someone who went to Kenya and Botswana recently for business. I was told, despite the huge social and infrastructure problems faced by these countries, it's amazing how fast and innovative people/businesses are with adapting technology, simply out of needs.

Kenya has already surpassed Mauritius in terms of online, mobile transactions, and web/IT development business opportunities. And there's already a growing number and great pool of very innovative and dedicated developers. East africa is already hooked up to a very high speed broadband undersea network.

In most African countries, telecom operators work like franchises. This encourages competitiveness and innovation, even for simple things like operating telephone booths or mobile phone and internet coverage in remote regions.

Africans are able to solve issues like wifi coverage and extend it for kms with basic milk tin cans (3x the manufacturers own estimates) and a car battery..

And where's the innovation in Mauritius despite the infrastructure and talent we have here ..! I'm an web consultant and i've been in mauritius for the past 5 years, and i feel that this country is in a complete stalemate...I remember the exiting moments in 2004-5 when mauritius was amongst the first countries in the world to test out wireless 4g/wimax etc.. but what great innovations, services and business opportunities that followed  after..?

This is not encouraging. I'm likely to be moving to Mauritius in the next few months and the internet is up there with food on my list of must-haves. It has to be rock solid and reliable. I don't do much downloading or have a need for super high speed but it must be reliable.

Ive had issues with Orange when living in France.

Can anyone tell me who the main providers are (Port Louis)?

Thanks

Can anyone tell me who the main providers are (Port Louis)?

ORANGE !!!

Yep ORANGE... and they even worse crap here. However I'm not complaining about the connectivity, which i think is 'okay', but rather their rudeness, lack of customer service.

If reliability is key, get a fixed line cable (MyT) and then a 3G backup usb modem from Emtel. That way you have two different providers (and infrastructural solutions) - when one of them goes down, use the other.

I have been running that setup for a couple of years and have rarely been without a connection.

Of course we're all in the same boat when it comes to problems with the SAFE submarine cable, and the connection with the rest of the world, but that's another story ...

We use Wimax from Emtel at work and it is very reliable (for instance, during the whole Orange blackouts we had no issues), even if we have the basic package, ie with no guaranteed bandwidth. I would definetely recommend it for anyone needing a serious connection, with skilled support people.

The technology itself is far for reliable than 3G and you get an unlimited access, unlike 3G.