Location! Location! Location!

The mantra of real estate agents has a familiar ring to it. We have all heard it before. Yet, the world we live in is dynamic and change is guaranteed.

We moved into a new suburb in March 2016 after we had lived for two years in an apartment owned by the same landlord from whom we had rented the five years prior to that as well. At our initial address, mobile broadband signal was quite good, measured in South African standards as my HSDPA dongle averaged around 7.5mbps while peaking at around 21mbps. Then he sold the property and allocated a different unit to us, just 300 metres down the same street and our signal was gone!  We had to change to a new service provider at much increased cost.

After we had moved to our current address, we suddenly had terrible connectivity issues and we once again had to change our service providers. Even so, where we live, even the best service providers are not on par. There simply are not enough mobile antennae in the area and the existing ones are antiquated Sony Ericsson pr Nokia towers, while the more modern Huawei ones are not yet deployed to my neck of the woods.

Current speeds are sometimes measured in mere bits per second!  Not even kilobits, let alone gigabYtes!

It is safe to say that one should first investigate a new neighbourhood if you want to relocate.  If you are like me and absolutely need mobile broadband for basic survival, then please ensure beforehand that there is good coverage, if no ADSL or Fibre Optic infrastructure around.  Satellite around here is prohibitively expense as if regular data does not already cost four to five times that of other countries.

Did I hear someone say: "Location!! Location!! Location!!" ??