The WSIS starts in a few days, and Tunisia has been preparing to show how successful it can and will be at hosting such big and important events.
But, unfortunately, big events like this come with a downside for the internet users of Tunisia.
2 years ago when Tunisia hosted the ICANN meetings; A big share of the national bandwidth was allocated to the hotel the meetings were being held at, as well as the hotels the guests were staying at. This at a time when those places weren’t even covered by broadband connections yet.
That left the rest of Tunisia with really bad internet connections. People at home found it impossible to surf the net, and companies who had leased lines or adsl felt like they were connected through a 56K modem.
It’s a shame that with the WSIS this year, the same problem is happening all over again.
For this past week, connecting through dialup has been near to impossible, and the supposedly higher speed connections have become a lot slower.
I know it’s important that we have high speed internet in the Kram Palexpo and in the hotels the guests are staying at, but we need the internet too, and those connections shouldn’t be provided at our expense.
In the end, this highlights one of the big problems poorer countries face, which is high bandwidth prices, limiting how much they can buy, and making them unable to provide wide-spread higher speed connections at good prices for their citizens.
I hope a solution will be found for this in the summit, for it is one of the main reasons behind the digital divide between countries.
[More (in French): Infinity]