Brown-out, rotating ones and others

For now over a month we experience at least two daily brown-outs in Camiguin. The rotating brown-outs are 1 hour around noon and 1 hour around 6 o’clock in the evening.

With these brown-outs we can live. We can schedule our work in function of the availability   of electricity. But the other brown-outs are really a mess. They hit us while we are uploading files to our websites. The results are incomplete files on the servers and angry visitors who see damaged pictures and have to stop reading in the middle of a truncated word.

For this very low-level service we pay the highest rates per kilowatt hour in South-East-Asia.  

And Interent! They call it “broadband”! Well, they call also any usable road a “highway”. At this very moment the upload speed is exactly 150 Bytes per second. 

And all afternoon-flights from and to Manila’s NAIA airport are delayed by 1.5 to 2 hours. Passengers get more and more angry and their costs for missed international flights and unplanned hotel-stays are increasing.

All these problems have common origins!

First:
The big companies here are managed like many sari-sari stores. The managers mix-up gross income with net income and create no reserves for needed investments, but pay themselves very neat salaries and bonuses.

Second:
Any industrial investment needs maintenance. Rather large sums are to be spent for  pro-active maintenance, upgrading, following growing customer demands and more. Here the money get’s lost in emergency repair, rental of external backup and firefighter style operations.

Third:
Everybody is talking, making great plans, declare their intention to do now really big. Short, everybody is noynoying – and we are waiting and paying for no electricity, for bad roads, for delayed and cancelled flights, for “snail-band” internet. 

Just at this moment we had another brown-out maybe you will be able to read this tomorrow. I start the transfer now, hoping that the next brown-out waits for 10 minutes.