South Africans reading that title will completely understand what I mean… Brits… not so much. On my arrival to Cape Town, bandwidth was a word that I had never needed to utter in my entire 18 years of living. However, in the last two years of my life, I have made up for my previous non-use of the term.
As I stepped into this new life in Cape Town, behind me I left many close friends and family, and my boyfriend. I naively thought that when I got to Cape Town, keeping in contact with everyone would be a doddle. With modern technology these days it is, after all, made so easy for us… we now live in a global village. I thought that for me and my boyfriend our skype dates would be a delightful concoction of voice and video, that we would practically be in the same room! However, sadly I was wrong, in South Africa you pay for the amount of bandwidth you use, this is measured in megabytes and gigabytes. For example, a 2 hour skype conversation (without video) would use about 70MB’s of internet. When I first arrived at the university res/halls where I was to call home last year, I was told that I would get 500MB’s of internet per month… this was not wireless either, I had to have my computer plugged into the wall! To me this meant less than 15hours of skype a month, if that is all I did with my internet. I did actually cry at one point… it just seemed like life in Cape Town was going to be more impossible than I had first thought.
ponderingsofarandomgirl 