Well — THIS SUCKS!!!

I live online. It’s my connection with the world outside mi barrio de español. Since I’m moving I had to make sure I would  be able to get online. Last week I went down to the Cable (Cah Blay) Onda offices in downtown David to check whether or not I could get their service at my new house.

“Oh, yes,” the girl said, “we have service at Brisas de Boquerón.” Great, but I didn’t want them to cut the service off immediately and leave me in the cold since I haven’t quite moved into the new place yet. Poco a poco it’s getting done. Well, today I went down to Cable Onda to set up installation at the new house. Guess what? Well, here, this map will show you what I mean…

You’ll probably have to click on the pic to enlarge it, so I’ll explain what it shows. See those yellow stick pins in the upper portion of the photo? That’s where my house is. The two yellow stick pins are where THE FUCKING SERVICE ENDS RIGHT NOW!!! That’s right, there’s no cable yet on the street where I live, and they have no idea when it might be strung. That really, REALLY SUCKS!

When I moved into the house here in Boquerón the barrio wasn’t wired for cable t.v. or internet. So what I used was a USB modem from the cellular company, Claro. It plugged into a USB port on the computer and, while slow, it was good enough to get most of the sites I use, like this one. It looked like this and it cost me $40/month for unlimited access.

It was okay, but when Cable Onda came around and offered faster internet speeds for the same price, I took them up on the offer, and by and large have been happy with the service. I say by and large because in the last month there have been several times when there was ZERO access, generally after a major thunderstorm moved through the area, and the outages were up to 20-hours long.

Well, after finding out I couldn’t be hooked up at the new house I immediately went to Claro and got their WiFi router service. Same price as I’ve been paying, but slower speeds but it’s better than nothing. And the reason I got the router was so I could download my free Kindle books to my tablet. Originally if I wanted to download books I’d ordered I either had to go up to the InfoPlaza at the town hall or use the country’s free WiFi system at the bus terminal. Not critical, but kind of a pain in the ass having to go to those places. The Claro router looks like this:

The router costs $80 if you go pre-paid which is what I used to do with the USB modem. HOWEVER, if you get a contract then the router is FREE with the plan I’ve chosen. And I was able to get on a contract. The agent, a young man named Kevin who spoke excellent English (our whole transaction which took well over an hour was conducted in a melangé of English and Spanish simply because I feel uncomfortable talking to Panamanians in English) asked me if I had credit here in Panama, a requisite to getting a contract. I said I’d never bought anything on credit here so I doubted I’d qualify. “Wait a minute,” he said, “how long have you had Cable Onda?” I told him about two years or so and he went to his computer and, sure enough, because I’ve been such a good customer with them I qualified to get a contract with Claro!  The contract is 18 months, but I can quit at any time with 30 days notice but there is a penalty and that’s that I’d have to pay the full price of the router.

The thing’s working fine. I’m giving it a test run right now writing this post. Well. that’s it. I’ll still be able to get online even if it isn’t the way I’d hoped it would be, but, as we used to say in Antibes, “c’est la vie.”