I have to be honest when I signed up for ZOL’s LTE offering, christened Wibroniks by their marketing gods, a year ago it was awesome. You could get internet speeds very near to the 15 Mpbs that they were touting. Now as of today you can count yourself lucky if you can get a tenth of that speed.

It all began with powercuts

When ZESA introduced their rolling powercuts last year, Liquid Telecoms (Wibronik’s providers) just buckled under pressure. Often the 18+ hour powercuts just took the base station down as soon as the fuel in the back up generators ran out of fuel.

Living near the CBD should mean that there is usually a backup base station to which one can connect to seeing as it is that I had opted for an outdoor modem which is supposed to have good range. Turns out that’s not the case, often when a base station went down so did my internet connection.

These days it’s now the opposite

These days it’s now the opposite, with the powercuts getting better, everytime there is power it means the internet will be mostly unusable. Powercuts are now turning out to be a blessing.

What do I mean by the internet is unusuable? I mean getting maximum speeds of 560 kpbs (70KBS) at best. At worst I have to wait a few seconds before I get a tick on a WhatsApp text message and I don’t mean one with video or pictures, just plain old text.

The lockdown has made a bad problem worse. Nothing works anymore and I now have to wake up in the middle of the night to get any work done. Hopefully ZOL will be able to resolve some of these issues or maybe they will disappear once the lockdowns around the world go away too.

All I know is during this lockdown, Wibroniks is now painfully slow.