I’ve Moved: New Address, New Contact Number

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008
by George Appiah

Just for everyone’s information — yesterday I packed my single suitcase out of my Haatso (Accra) apartment, after hanging around for about 12 months. I really loved the quietness of Haatso, but I moved primarily because, I couldn’t get a faster Internet connection at a reasonable fee.

I had been using Ghana Telecom’s “Alvarion Broadband” service, which is capped at 256/64kbps (shared, with an unlawfully high contention ratio). There are no fixed lines around, and hence no DSL, and the other alternatives are prohibitively expensive.

Anyway, I’ve moved to Tesano, also in Accra. And I managed to work out a fixed line and ADSL service even before I moved in. This came as a big surprise to a friend who has lived in the area for over three years, but has not been able to get Ghana Telecom to provision a fixed telephone line for her.

So how did I get? No, I didn’t pay any bribes. Nada. I never do. In case you didn’t know, I once worked at Ghana Telecom as a Radio Network Optimisation Engineer, and a lot of my college mates are still there, some in big positions. So I certainly have a lot of strings I can pull at GT.

Currently there’s only data and no voice. Actually the voice number has been assigned but not fully provisioned yet. I’m also using just 128/32kbps — but so far I find it faster than the more expensive 256/64 kbps service I was using at my previous apartment. That tells how terrible the contention was. I’ll push the data speed up as soon as I settle down to do something serious. Tell you about that later.

But what about my plans to live in the streests? Great question. I had a chat with one of my doctors about this, who managed to scare me out of it. How ingeniously stupid of me! As you probably know already, I’ve been battling a heart problem for a quite some time now, and my doctors remain one of the very few peple on this plant who’s opinions I truly value.

I’ve got a lot of things coming shortly. Stay glued.