Mobile blogging

Well, so much for thinking I'd be posting every day while in Kenya. I bought a Safaricom Mobile Office HSDPA USB Modem for my Apple MacBookPro as soon as I arrived last December (Ksh9,999, or a bit less than £100) and it does work, most of the time. You can find reception in the most unlikely places (Maasai Mara?!). But the speeds are cripplingly slow. You pay a minimum of Ksh1000 per month for 300mb of usage. This may not sound much, but it's plenty. Because much of the time I'm struggling to download or send emails at speeds of less 1 kb/sec (ie less than 1mb per 15 mins). Occasionally, as now, the blue light is on and I'm reading a top rate of 50.7kb/sec. But the lovely folks at Safaricom service centres (and they are, universally, extremely smart and helpful) just say that the software isn't fully matched to Macs, so gives unreliable info. So I don't reallly know. I'd be interested to hear of other people's experiences.