We have already written about the difficult road of introduction of wireless internet to the masses. Amazingly, some countries have not even resolved wired access problems and Greece is unfortunately one of those places. To start with, ADSL2+ is the best connection tech available and is marketed as the solution to all our problems. But is it like that? Not quite… The largest part of the country gets 2 Mbps maximum and the only provider is OTE, the national telecoms company. Some areas get 4 or 8 Mbps but for only parts of the country, in other words Athens and Thessaloniki, Athens and Thessaloniki & of course Athens and Thessaloniki. You want a connection from another supplier? Sure! But you have to pay them the monthly ISP charges and OTE the line lease charges. But the best part you have not heard yet! In the case that you have a problem, the ISP blames OTE and OTE blames the ISP. Sounds funny? Well it isn’t, simply because when you call any company’s hotline you might have to wait for hours (it is not a joke, it happens all the time) and then the service you get might be very very far from what a customer would expect.
The biggest complaint of existing customers is that of low download speeds. My connection of 512 Mbps was upgraded for free to 1 Mbps last year, but for the largest part of the day I get speeds of my old 512 Mbps or even slower! What’s the whole point of promising speeds that cannot be offered? Moreover, what’s the point of paying for speeds you only get between midnight and 8 am? Open any computer magazine and it will be full of ISP adds offering 2-play, 3-play and speeds up to 24 Mbps. These only apply to private networks which currently exist guess where… Athens, Thessaloniki and hopefully soon in other places too… Read the rest of this entry »
