What is with my internet connection?

Telia (and the infrastructure operator Skanova) are actively phasing out the old telephone network. Mostly because of the maintenance cost associated with these old over-ground copper cables.

I live in a place where they stopped servicing households on April 1st, 2017. The wire is still there, it has just turned useless.

Telia themselves will not be building new fibre optics infrastructure on the country side. This means there is no true alternative to the ADSL we were able to get on the old network. The one alternative they offer: a 4G data plan.

Another problem with the country side? 4G is often unstable, and you will often see drops down to 3G. Devastating your entire connection.

Like all data plans, these are capped on a monthly basis. And raising the cap (“buying extra GBs”) gets expensive real fast. For the first year, because of the decommissioning of ADSL, my household is now on a 300 GB/month data plan.

In a house of 4, that comes down to about 2.5 GB of data per person per day.

All my entertainment is gotten through online media. I listen to music through Spotify, I follow current events from my favourite news outlets, I watch films and series on Netflix, I enjoy watching video games being played on Twitch, … every day I need to prioritise what gets my bandwidth and what I postpone.

Luckily the people around here have bonded together and started a co-operative to roll out the infrastructure ourselves. Putting down an entire fibre optics net for such few connections is costly and time consuming. If everything stays on schedule, we should get hooked up before winter comes.

Until then don’t be surprised when I do not download some new fancy software package, disable my webcam on video conferences, or drop out of an online event because of connectivity issues.