Saturday has gradually acquired a very specific function in our life in Moldova. During the week, work and everyday responsibilities make it difficult for us to go around Chișinău together, so Saturday has become the day when we try to solve everything at once. There is usually a list. Sometimes there are several lists. We drive from one place to another buying things, asking questions, comparing prices and dealing with whatever the renovation of our apartment has decided to demand from us that week.
Today one of the items on the list sounded relatively straightforward: choose an Internet provider for the renovated apartment.
As somebody who has spent a substantial part of his professional life working with technology and infrastructure, I thought I understood roughly what the exercise would involve. Check which fibre providers serve the building, compare perhaps 500 Mbps and 1 Gbps packages, look at upload speeds, equipment and contract conditions, and make a decision later.
Moldova, apparently, had other ideas.
How much Internet would Sir like?
The first surprise was discovering just how far residential Internet offerings in Chișinău have moved. Multiple providers now operate modern fibre networks, and the numbers being advertised are the sort of numbers I would normally associate with serious business connectivity or a particularly enthusiastic homelab.
StarNet, for example, currently advertises residential fibre packages at 2.5 Gbps, 5 Gbps and up to 10 Gbps in Chișinău. The 5 Gbps package includes Wi-Fi equipment and television and costs 450 Moldovan lei per month. At current exchange rates, that is roughly €23. There are promotions and other packages that can make the effective price even lower, and one of the offers we collected today came to roughly €17.50 per month for multi-gigabit fibre connectivity together with television.
Orange Moldova has gone in the same direction. Its new XGS-PON network is technically capable of up to 10 Gbps, with its current premium residential package advertising real-world access speeds of up to 8 Gbps download and 7 Gbps upload. Moldtelecom has also introduced multi-gigabit residential services using XGS-PON technology.
I had to look at the numbers more than once.
What makes this particularly amusing to me is the comparison with Germany. Deutsche Telekom's current mainstream residential fibre portfolio goes up to 1 Gbps download and 500 Mbps upload. That is already an excellent home connection by any reasonable standard, but its normal monthly price is around €70. In Chișinău I am standing in a shop being offered several times that bandwidth, plus television and equipment, for a fraction of the price.
There are qualifications, of course. A headline fibre speed and the speed experienced by a single device over Wi-Fi are not the same thing. A 5 or 10 Gbps connection also becomes rather pointless if the internal network consists entirely of ordinary gigabit Ethernet ports. To exploit it properly I would need suitable 2.5 or 10 GbE equipment, appropriate Wi-Fi clients and probably another excellent excuse to buy networking hardware that no normal household actually requires.
Fortunately, I have never claimed that our household is normal when it comes to computer equipment.
We did not sign anything today. The purpose was to collect the offers, understand what is actually available at the apartment and make the decision later. We therefore added the brochures and numbers to the growing collection of renovation information and continued with the rest of our Saturday list.
Then I found the hat
Somewhere along the way, I passed a Georgian restaurant.
Outside was one of the people advertising the restaurant, and he was wearing an enormous traditional-looking white Georgian fur hat. It was magnificent. It was completely impractical. It was roughly the size of a small sheep and made his head look approximately three times larger than nature intended.
Naturally, I wanted to try it.
This is one of those situations where adulthood and dignity should probably intervene. I am sixty years old. I should be capable of walking past a restaurant without borrowing the advertising man's enormous fluffy hat and asking somebody to take my photograph.
Apparently I am not.
The result is the photograph accompanying this post. I look somewhere between a Georgian mountain warrior, an ageing 1980s rock musician and somebody who has suffered a catastrophic accident in a hairdryer factory. I was delighted.
The photograph also fits rather nicely with something I continue to enjoy about Chișinău. For a relatively small capital, it contains an interesting mixture of cultures, languages, restaurants and communities. Romanian and Russian are part of everyday life, but one also encounters Ukrainian, Turkish, Georgian and many other influences. Moldova's geography and history place it at an intersection where different parts of Europe and the wider region have been meeting for a very long time.
I initially described my Georgian encounter as “Central Asia arriving in Chișinău”, which would undoubtedly annoy a geographer and probably a fair number of Georgians as well. Georgia is not in Central Asia. It belongs to the South Caucasus, sitting between the Black Sea and the Caucasus and at the geographical and cultural crossroads between Eastern Europe and Western Asia.
So, more accurately, the Caucasus had arrived in Chișinău. And I had put part of it on my head.
Perhaps Georgia is trying to tell us something
There is another small coincidence. The Georgian Embassy is only a short walk from our apartment in central Chișinău. Georgia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs lists the embassy on 31 August 1989 Street, very close to the part of the centre where we spend so much of our time. So Georgia has actually been sitting quietly in our neighbourhood all along; I simply needed an enormous white hat before I started paying proper attention.
That immediately produced the next idea: perhaps we should visit Georgia.
It would hardly be an unreasonable destination from Moldova. Georgia has been somewhere on my mental list of countries worth exploring for a long time, with Tbilisi, the Caucasus mountains, Georgian food, wine and a history extending far beyond anything that could sensibly be reduced to one holiday. Our encounter today was obviously not a travel-planning exercise, but this is often how our travel ideas begin. Something small catches our attention, we start talking about it, and eventually somebody opens a map.
I am therefore treating the hat as a possible sign.
Not a particularly sophisticated sign, admittedly.
But a sign nevertheless.
Another completely normal Saturday
Looking back, the whole afternoon was rather representative of our life here at the moment. We left home with practical things to solve for the renovation. We investigated Internet connections and discovered that Chișinău providers are casually discussing residential bandwidth that would have sounded absurdly excessive only a few years ago. We collected the information, postponed the actual decision, continued with our errands and somehow ended up with me standing on a pavement wearing a gigantic Georgian hat.
There is something I enjoy about these Saturdays. The renovation can be exhausting, and the endless sequence of things that need to be bought, ordered, installed or decided sometimes feels as though it will never finish. But the process also forces us to explore the city in a way we never would as tourists. We discover shops, neighbourhoods, restaurants, services and small pieces of everyday Chișinău simply because we need a cable, a lamp, an Internet connection or whatever happens to be next on the list.
Today's practical discovery was that Moldova's Internet infrastructure can be astonishingly fast and astonishingly inexpensive. Today's less practical discovery was that I look surprisingly happy underneath an unreasonable quantity of Georgian wool.
Both were useful information.
Now I only have two decisions to make.
Do I really need 10 Gbps Internet at home?
And should we start looking at flights to Georgia?
I already know which of those questions is likely to become expensive first.
Where relevant, factual references were checked against official telecommunications providers and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia. Prices and commercial Internet offers can change and depend on service availability at a particular address. The personal experiences, comparisons, humour and conclusions presented here remain my own.
Comments
Post a Comment