We are quite spoiled in Germany when it comes to the internet. We always have good reception and fast internet everywhere, Wi-Fi on every corner and we don’t have to worry about the data volume of our SIM card. But what happens when there is no Wi-Fi?
That’s exactly how it is here
I already knew in Germany that my German SIM card and the fees for using the internet in Ghana would quickly cost me a fortune. So I had to get a local card. It worked well and quickly, the company has one for me, I don’t even have to pay for it. After a few teething problems, the “WLAN hotspot” via my mobile phone also worked with the new card. So everything’s fine, I thought, and deactivated 90% of the apps on my phone so that they don’t keep downloading updates.
After 2 days, I received a text message saying that I had used up 80% of my data volume. Can’t be, I thought to myself, it’s 25GB per month.
Until I realised that my MacBook was responsible. It thinks, great, I’m in the WLAN, I can update everything right away and download all the necessary updates.
So I had to find the right diagnostic computer and software. Without the Internet, that’s not possible.
What do I do now? First, I switched off all cloud services like OneDrive, I-Cloud, Adobe, … and everything else there is. Then I switched off the email programme.
Now it works and I get by with the data volume for the month.
Attempts to access the network at work didn’t work, or rather they didn’t want to. They don’t have WLAN, and they wouldn’t let me connect to the LAN just like that. The answer was that it’s too complicated technically, we can’t do it because only certain MAC addresses are enabled. OK, I understood, they don’t want to; but that’s OK, I have the SIM card.
Then I asked myself how they work here at all.
Most, but not all, have a smart phone. So internet works. Some don’t have one, but somehow it works for them too. Since I had one of these textbooks digitally in English, it wasn’t too difficult to pack the contents into small bites and send them to everyone after the training. But most of them don’t have a laptop or PC at home. Everything they do can only be done on their smart phones. I got to know it that way, first the PC, then the laptop, then the smart phone. The people here skipped the first two steps and went straight to the smart phone. I find it extremely difficult to have everything on the thing, firstly because the screen is quite small and I can’t imagine how I could organise my data on the smart phone. But it’s possible, people here can do it.
And about five years ago, there wasn’t even that here. There was a transmission mast and it still had to be switched on specially. There was internet for 1 hour a day in the evening, where you could load and send your emails. Then there was no internet until the next evening.
#StayTuned
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