Posted by Dimitrios Matsoulis on April 22, 2008
ElectronRun is now a hosted blog. New posts will continue to appear here for limited time. Continue to read new posts by pointing your browser to http://electronrun.com and subscribing there by clicking on the RSS icon.
Up to the start of January 2008 my 1Mbps ADSL connection with Otenet was working ok, apart from some very scattered disconnections when somebody was calling my home line. It was a minor problem, as I use the home landline only for Internet work and since OTE -the owner of Otenet- is the largest Greek telecoms company that effectively owns all lines in my hometown in Greece I did not dare move to another ISP.
So when OTE advertised 24Mbps speeds in January 2008, I jumped to the opportunity and applied for such a line on the 8th of January 2008. Here is what followed:
- I was informed that the necessary ADSL2+ modem that was necessary was not in stock, so I agreed to wait for its arrival. I asked for my line to be upgraded after the modem’s arrival, since the modem I was then using was not able to handle speeds higher than 8Mbps.
- Guess what! Next Saturday morning -12th of January 2008- my line was upgraded to 24Mbps and I was stuck all weekend without Internet as OTE offices were of course closed and the hotline could not do anything about my modem upgrade. The dirty story is that Otenet does all speed upgrades on Saturdays so that technicians get paid overtime. I am in no position to confirm the validity of this statement. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in internet | Tagged: OTE, Greece, OTEnet | No Comments »
Posted by Dimitrios Matsoulis on April 15, 2008
At the end of 2007 I wrote about the troubles of Greek broadband users. Since then, we have heard a lot of nice statistics about how Greece has the highest broadband growth rate in the EU and how a lot of Greek homes are coming online. But are statistics the true picture? Far from it…
In the last two months a lot has changed in terms of speeds offered, but not much in terms of quality of service. In February, under pressure from competitors and in order to stop defections, OTEnet-the ISP branch of OTE- decided to offer 24Mbps ADSL+, up from the 8Mbps that was the maximum till then. I was one of the first to apply but do not want to get in the details of the mess that ensued to get a barely working line after three whole weeks!
To cut things short, I ended up with a 2Mbps DSL connection that disconnects many times every hour -should it be called a disconnection?- and cannot be used reliably for many tasks I need to undertake. Maybe I will get in the details of the story above in a separate post, but what is important here is that I am not the only one to have these problems. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in internet | Tagged: wind, WiMax, WiFi, OTE, internet, 3G, Greece, ADSL, OTEnet, Cosmote, Vodafone, 3.5G | 4 Comments »
Posted by Dimitrios Matsoulis on February 5, 2008
Source: National Statistical Service of Greece
Since 2002, the National Statistical Service of Greece is announcing its study results on Internet usage in Greece, according to EU standards. The graph above presents computer usage -the blue line- and more importantly Internet usage -the red line. So here is the high points:
-
Internet access in the Greek population has more than doubled in five years.
-
Internet and computer usage are more or less synonymous.
-
The percentage of computer users without Internet access is shrinking -the reason the two lines converge. It was 39% in 2002 and went down to 17% in 2007!
-
Both computer and Internet usage have accelerated since 2005.
-
The potential for the IT and Internet market is still large due to the untapped part of the population that currently uses non of the two.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in internet | Tagged: Greece, internet, National Statistical Service of Greece | No Comments »
Posted by Dimitrios Matsoulis on December 19, 2007
Speculation over the fate of OTE has reached an all time high when earlier this year the Greek government sought startegic partners in an effort to make the organisation more competitive. An expensive early pension plan for staff failed to attract a large investor and has not reduced the risk of falling behind in terms of infrastructure and service quality against similar European companies. The current position of OTE could be described as extremely critical for its future. The stock market euphoria of the end of the nineties and the need for more cash of the Greek government to meet EU targets of this decade have brought repetitive sales of government packages. The current Greek government holding to OTE is a currently low 28%. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in telecoms | Tagged: Deutsche Telekom, Greece, MIG, OTE, telecom | 1 Comment »
Posted by Dimitrios Matsoulis on December 18, 2007
Greece is the 14th richest country in the EU. In a place with almost 100% mobile telephony penetration, one would expect the internet penetration statistics to be very good. Unfortunately, the news coming from the Observatory for the Greek Information Society is very disheartening. Here is some shocking numbers. Only 27.4% of Greek homes have internet access. And even more significantly, only 21.7% of those make use of the internet weekly. What this means is that a shockingly low 6% of Greek homes uses the internet weekly! And bearing in mind that not everybody in a home is a user it is simple to understand that the pinnacle of the modern economy is not taken incredibly seriously. The average numbers for the EU are 51%, 47% and 24% respectively, not good enough, but a totally different picture to the Greek figures… Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in internet | Tagged: Greece, internet | No Comments »
Posted by Dimitrios Matsoulis on December 13, 2007
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 »
Posted in internet | Tagged: EETT, Greece, internet, ISP, OTE | 4 Comments »
