DSL Internet:

What I'm paying $500.00BZE plus 10% GST for:
1 MB download speed, 512KB upload speed.
What I'm actually getting:
896MB download speed, 315KB upload speed.

I'm paying for the 256kb down load and getting right around 235kb. I am guessing you can tweak your system and get completely up to speed, but I am pretty sure I'm already as far up to speed as I will get.

I suppose we could ask BTL to change its advertising to offer TRUE speeds. But that just isn't the Belizean Way.

Chris, I can totally understand your frustrations. I think my phone bill is $500 per month BEFORE I make a telephone call! $50 per line maintenance fees, some equipment rentals and the dsl line of course PLUS GST.

The Voip is helping keep my internation bills down, but honestly the international rates these days are not too outrageous.

There are so many satelite systems out there these days, but at the moment it seems that hughes net is probably still your best bet for consistantly being up and running. You are still going to end up being better off financially and connectivity wise with BTL.

Seems that BTL have finally hacked Hotspot Shield, the free version at any rate. I was getting strange results yesterday, culminating in an ear-splitting whistle that didn't go away. I understand from people who've been through the same recently that the more expensive pay version, which I think is called Hotspot 2, is sufficiently complex that BTL haven't made any impact on it. And as it costs somewhere around US$100/year it's unlikely that the take-up will be sufficient for BTL to bother about it.

I've said it before - if only they'd spend even a fraction of what they spend blocking the competition on improving their own service we could all be dramatically better off. They won't of course, unless a change in government results in the law actually being applied.

I get 50 Mbps
Is that good?

nope.

ANOTHER great BTL rip off is their VOIP service "Web Talk." It's a sort of Skype imitation, much simpler interface, you sign on and you can make cheap international calls. Sounds wonderful, doesn't it?

Here's the kicker(s).

1. About 3 weeks after it came on line it fell victim to the "restructuring" of Mr. Ashcroft's Belize Telecommunications Ltd. rename to Belize Telemedia Ltd. It went down for about 3 months...if you had credit you couldn't use it.

2. Now, about 1 month after it came back on stream we discover that it is a service meant for everyone on the planet EXCEPT those living in Belize. Yep, that's right, they block their own service in Belize so that if you don't have access to the right anti-blocking software you HAVE to use BTL land lines to make international calls.

I'm trying to think what has Mr. Ashcroft given to Belize in return to the obscene amounts of money he has made out of this country. He could afford to build good primary schools in every town and village in Belize from his petty cash reserves and he wouldn't even notice a dent in his personal fortune it but you don't see him do that.

Yes, there's a stadium named after him and yes, BTL and Belize Bank offer a few paltry scholarships each year, but apart from that he really offers nothing to this country. He might argue that he employs hundreds but if he didn't have the bank and the phone company someone else would and those same people would have jobs.

His wealth in comparison to Belize's size is many times more than Bill Gates' in comparison to the size of the USA. Bill and Melinda Gates are great benefactors to charity, Mr. Ashcroft is a great benefactor to Mr. Ashcroft.

Personal rape is quite rightly a heinous crime but but what do you get for raping an entire country? Nothing in Belize, it appears.

What a wanker.