Every now and again, something happens to make one realise, as if for the first time, just how closely the silvery thread of telecommunications is woven through the fabric of one`s life.
In my case, it involved a 9 000km move from most things South African - of which, I miss most notably, the soil, the sunshine and believe it or not, the SABC.
It`s very hard, in this place, to fall back on truisms that thrive in the South African context.
Basheera Khan, journalist, freelance
It`s somewhat harder to get away from the people, of course, because as we all know, there is no London anymore. It is now a Little Souf Efrika, wherein it is easier to eavesdrop on commuters speaking Afrikaans or Tswana than to understand the dialects of English that those native to the island have developed - but that`s another story altogether.
I also left behind the kind of regular Internet access that, despite its meagre bandwidth and less than reliable service providers, I longed for with all my heart - better that than the uncomfortably disconnected state I found myself in on arriving in the UK.
Thankfully, it was a condition easy enough to remedy, due to the proliferation of access points in the country. Between the sponsored standalone terminals at Heathrow Airport and access services offered by public institutions such as libraries and schools, BT-operated coin and cardphones that afford you the choice of communication via telephone, e-mail or text messaging, high profile 24-hour Internet cafes such as easyAnything, or dodgy hole-in-the-wall Internet cafes, it`s possible to be online, all the time, from as little as lb1 per hour.
Net etiquette
Of course, there are certain concessions that have to be made. In places where access is free of charge, etiquette demands sessions of only 30 minutes each, if there is a queue. The access points at Heathrow`s terminal 2, being sponsored by a company with very specific interests, allow access limited to Hotmail and various news snippets provided by CNN.com.
The hole-in-the-wall Internet cafes, though cheaper than their franchised bigger brothers, are often plagued by slow access speeds, while the bigger brothers themselves are only located in the established business centres of the city - tough luck if your travels take you farther afield than central London.
The point is, it`s very hard, in this place, to fall back on truisms that thrive in the South African context, and claim that the government is not doing enough to subsidise Internet access, or that Internet service providers are extorting the consumer base.
In this telecommunications industry which is less tyrannically regulated than the one with which I am familiar, the range of services and service providers from which to choose is positively obscene. And the level of understanding displayed by the British government, in the Internet`s role in assisting it to communicate with and service its citizenship, is exemplary.
It strikes me that SA has more to gain if the government would consider paying closer attention to trade with Britain in cultural exchanges of the digital kind, and leaving the ill-judged commercial arms transactions to those African countries with more obvious banana republic ambitions.
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