For some time now, my Internet access has been slowing down.  This is perfectly normal in the USA, of course, but I live in Norway. And it is not only American web sites, although those are bad enough.  But lately, even my Scandinavian net bank has been so slow as to be unusable in the evening.  I managed to queue up some bills tonight, but it took a long time of fervent button mashing. I was not amused. 

Using Traceroute, I found that there was a bottleneck – well, more like a corked bottle – at the beginning and end of Telia.net.  Telia is the Swedish near-monopoly on telephone, much as Telenor is in Norway, formerly a government agency until knowledge of the American way of life made people yearn for freedom here in Scandinavia as well.  But evidently we have not yearned enough, or at least the Swedes haven’t.  Guess they are a bit insulated from the western winds, lying on the other side of the Norwegian mountains…

It looks like my ISP, NextGenTel, uses Telia for all Internet traffic that leaves the country, even temporarily.  And of course that includes my journal. The more text there is, the less chance of getting it uploaded.  I hope something is done about this soon.  

I would hate to have to go back to Telenor, which had downtimes of a week or more, and lied like toddlers when I called them about the problems, completely stupidly made up fake explanations at the moment. You could call two times in the same day and get two completely different stories about why the Net was not working. It was painfully obvious that they were paid to lie rather than actually find out what was wrong.  It will, I believe, be a very chilly day in the idyllic Norwegian small town of Hell, before I go back to Telenor. 

The wireless broadbank I use in the city is fine, though. I may have to upload things from there, or take my portable home.  Or perhaps it has to do with the time of day?  Perhaps Telia’s lines are completely clogged with BitTorrent traffic… or hate mail after a kangaroo court meted out draconic punishment to the four young men who run Pirate Bay.  Or perhaps it is the Swedish Internet censorship – mandated by a recent law that lets the government read all mail that passes through the country – that slows down the Net too…

Anyway, that’s my excuse for today!