What will you do when your connection to the outside world is gone, and you are on your own? It happened to me…. well, sort of. 😉
As most of you probably know, in the final week of December there was a pair of big earthquakes in Taiwan, and they severed two under sea fiber optic cables that link Asia to the Internet. It really slowed the internet connection here in the Philippines to a crawl. Some days the internet, while slow, was still usable. Other days, like the past week, the Internet has been so slow that trying to use it was frustrating and virtually impossible.
Now, in the relatively short life of this blog, I have mentioned several times that I earn my living through the Internet. Having the Internet virtually unavailable over the past week or so has really made it hard to keep business going. But, I’ve survived. One thing that I have been doing is to get up at around 3am instead of my usual 6:30am or 7:00. The reason that I do this is because there are far fewer people using the local internet during the middle of the night. Most offices are closed, and most casual surfers are asleep at this hour. If I start around 3am or so, I can be fairly productive on the net until around 8am or 9am. By 9am the net has again screeched to a standstill. So, I go back to bed at 9 or so, and sleep until Noon or 1:00pm. Then, I find something else to keep me busy during the day.
With this schedule, at least I can keep my businesses up and running, which is a good thing. It’s not ideal, but right now, I suspect it is the best solution to keep business going. I am hearing that the under sea cables should be repaired by around Jan. 22 or so. I hope it’s no longer, because Valentine’s Day is a major business season for my business, and I need full net access from the last week of January until the end of February.
If you were living in the Philippines, or some other of the far reaches of the world and the Internet went down, how would you stay in touch with the rest of the world?