To say that communications have improved in Paraguay since I first arrived here over 20 years ago would be something of an understatement.
These days almost everyone has access to a smart phone and all that it provides. Things were very different back then.
All the more so as I have always been out in the countryside rather than in a town or city. The sort of place that was never going to be the first to be connected to the outside world.
The particular piece of countryside I have always been based in is the green hills and valleys outside the small hilltown of Piribebuy.
When I first arrived at the location that going to be my home and the English school for the next couple of years it was a bit of a surprise that there was no way of contacting the outside world. I had come from England where everyone had access to a phone and things like mobile phones and the internet were becoming more and more just another part of everyday life.
In the field that was to become the English school they most definitely were far from becoming everyday.
It was actually quite nice to be shut off from the rest of the world.
Landlines did not exist and people did not own mobile phones as they did not work out in the countryside.
Occasionally climbing to the very top of the hill and waving a phone about is was possible to get a very weak signal. Far to poor to actually use the phone for anything and liable to drop out at any moment.
So I went for a long time without hearing the sound of a ringing phone.
There was a shop a couple of miles further down the road that did have a pay phone. However I never had cause to use it, so don’t know how well it worked or how it connected to the telephone network. That was the only phone along the entire 20 miles of the valley.
To communicate in anyway a trip into Piribebuy was required. That itself was a far from simple process.
First there was just one bus into town. That left every day at 7am. From there then about a 40 minute drive in a very old bus into town.
Here though if need be a phone call could be made. The national phone company had phone booths in it’s office in town.
The cost of using a pay phone to phone Enland was as could be expected expensive. I think I only made one or two phone calls, but at least knew it was an option should an emergency arrive.
Addtionally Piribebuy had an internet cafe. From there if everything worked out just right I was able to reply to my emails once a week.
Using the internet cafe did not however always work out as planned.
There may or may not be electricity and even if there was there was never any certainty that the computers would have a connection to the internet.
Those computers were very old ones that had clearly seen better days and come second hand from somewhere. Whenever they were working the connection was always very slow. Good enough to check and reply to emails, but little else.
On those days when I arrived in Piribebuy to find the internet unavailable there was nothing to do other than sit in the plaza for three hours waiting for the bus back.
As the result of all that was that at times I was unable to check even my emails for a couple of weeks I did sometimes go into Asuncion for the weekend. Two nights in a hotel just to answer a few emails!
After the English school had finished and I began living in my house things did slowly start to improve.
The first thing to appear was a phone signal. This was still weak and patchy but was something at last.
That signal only seemed to work in certain places. Everyone learnt where abouts in their garden they had to stand to use the phone. I remember seeing phones hanging from trees in old socks where someone had found just the right spot.
Connections were still very weak so to start with sending a text message was far wiser than trying to make an actual phone call.
Bit by bit matters did improve and as the phone companies put in more infrastructure the signal got stronger. Eventually I could make a phone call standing almost anywhere in the house or garden. Being up on the hillside certainly helped.
It was about this time that I first had my own internet connection at home.
Rather than through a phone that was via a dongle plugged into the laptop. The signal was still not strong but as long as it stayed at 3g rather than 2g I could at least have my own internet connection.
Back then getting your own internet connection was quite complicated. A pay as you go contract took a time to get authorized and a proper monthly contract required even more time and paperwork to get signed up to.
Those first dongles came straight from China with all the ZTE branding and packaging unaltered. Only several years later did the various Paraguayan phone companies have them rebranded with their own logos.
The speed of the connection was never great, but for anything other than video it was adequate. A huge improvement on how things had previously been.
Dongles now of course are things of the past and it has been several years since I last saw one.
It was as it remains moblie internet which is always going to have issues. These remain even now but on the whole are far less of a problem.
The first was that the signal could be blocked by terrain. Luckily I live on a hillside so don’t have a wall of rock between me and the phone mast.
Then there was the weather. I soon discovered that thick low cloud would slow the connection or even cut it off. So on stormy days stayed away from the computer.
And another issue which has become more important over the years as more and more people got smart phones is that the more people connect to and try and use the internet the less bandwidth everyone gets. This is most noticable at the weekends when more people are free from doing other things and so are on their phones.
However as the service provided is continually being upgraded this to is becoming less of an issue.
These days the signal is almost always a 4g one. That is enough to usually stream videos trouble free.
I have seen that improve over time. At first a video would just play a few seconds at a time before freezing, then gradually longer segments would play before everything ground to a halt.
I have spent many hours watching the spinning circle on the screen waiting for something to happen.
So now I have a quite acceptable internet connection. It though is still far from the speed of a broadband one. Loading up a bit of video to YouTube still takes an hour or two.
These days as I look around me here in the Paraguayan countryside I can see that almost everyone has a smart phone. For many of those people a smart phone is the first phone they have ever had, jumping all the technological steps that brought them there.
To sign up these days for an internet connection is simple in Paraguay. A pay as you go one can be arranged in a few minutes. It takes a little longer to set up a monthly contract but as that locks a person in for 18 months it’s not a bad thing that it can’t be signed up for in moments.
The internet continues to advance here in Paraguay. The 4g connection is becoming faster and more robust, fibre optics reaching out beyond town centres and now 5g is arriving in Asuncion and at some point will roll out from there across the country.
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