Really bad Internet access today...

Well I spoke too soon yesterday about having decent Internet.  After lunch the Internet got really sluggish to the point of nothing working on my laptop or other people's either.  The wireless connection at this location was fine, but the connection from the network to the Internet was not working well at all.  We were really concerned about it because I was to teach a Google Apps course today and I had planned on a lot of interactive labs which all required Internet access!

The Network Manager here called their ISP (the company who provides their Internet connection) and asked them to upgrade it because we had a lot of IT people here and we needed more bandwidth.  But we think the problem is bigger than just a lack of bandwidth. This morning a couple of us got up at sunrise before all the other IT people had arisen and ran some speed tests and it was still terrible.

Hank, Teaching on Google Apps

I taught the first half of my course today but we had to leave out most of the online labs because the Internet was so bad.  When I say bad, I mean like nobody could even get to google.com to do a search and even minimal email was not working as it should.  Interestingly, the email on our smart phones was working, and that uses the same Internet connection as laptops, not a cellular connection here.  But I think the cell phone email uses less data and so it seemed to work better.  In fact even now I am having to type this into my phone because my laptop couldn't get a good enough connection to post this text.

We are praying that the ISP vendor fixes the problem tomorrow.  The connection is much worse than what most of our field offices have!  Please join us in praying that this gets better, as much of the training over this two week timeframe requires Internet access.  Thanks!