Saved From the Snares of the Internet!

A research I read recently found out that the average teenager now spends some 7 hours glued to digital devices; through iMacs and iPods and iPhones and iPads in the great North iAmerica.

Just after reading that article, I came across a story on Yahoo News about a mother who violently shook her baby because the infant’s crying was disturbing her session on Facebook. She was playing Farmville, and apparently concluded that tending to digital sheep, cows and cabbages was more important than taking care of the baby. The baby died.

Just...memories, now.

As you can see, the darn western world’s gone nuts because of the internet, and the rest of the world is quickly following in its footsteps.

It is in view of this sobering fact that our trusty monopolistic telecoms provider, Econet Wireless, decided to step in and protect us from these shocking world developments. Their method is simple: hiking internet tariffs so much as to make any decent internet surfing impractical.

For instance, a 5 Megabyte bundle of data will cost you $2, and expires the same day you purchase it; 100MB will cost you $30; 200MB costs $50 and 1Gigabyte will cost you an arm and a leg.

A friend of mine went for the $30 package for his data line; four days later, the system was crying out for more…and he hadn’t even changed his Facebook photo yet, let alone actually download anything.

Funny thing: this same company kept promising a while back that the messy digging they did all over our nice roads to lay cables would bring a faster and much cheaper internet to the ordinary Zimbabwean.

I guess they were just saying.

This kind of reminds me of the ‘Big Bang Theory’…you know, big company acting all inefficient and arrogant especially because there is no competition to keep the bully in check.

I’ve heard of two companies called Africom and Powertel, but it seems their coverage is still too minuscule to speak of. Then there is Telecel which seemed very promising (since it’s backed by a giant Egyptian company) – that is, until they postponed their 3G introduction from September 2010 (that’s last month!) to sometime next year. As for NetOne….NetOne…well, I don’t know anything about NetOne. Info, anybody?

So fellow Zimbabweans, I am pleased to announce that you are relatively safe from the corrupting influence of the internet, unless you have an awfully lot of cash to burn. There is no way you are going to be spending 7+ hours killing all of your social life through internet addiction.

You are not going to be killing your babies anytime soon either.

Postscript: Econet  has slashed its mobile internet prices. 5Mb now costs a dollar, 100Mb $20 and 200Mb is now $40. A gig will still cost you an arm and a leg though. Looking forward to more price slashes and moral corruption as the competition heats up!