| A similarly curious case is Moldova, Romania's neighbour. I grew up there, I remember dial up and wasting a lot of my mother's money on it. Then the state run ISP rolled out ADSL and it got way better. In the span of 2-3 years, I went from 64/64 kbit/s to 6/1 Mbps. In another year, it was 24/1 Mbps, and yet another year or so they started rolling out fiber, with free upgrades for everyone as long as you renewed the contract. 30/30 Mbps, then 100/100 Mbps, now you can get 1000/1000 for $20 or 300/300 Mbps for $10. Upgrading to a higher speed is still free afaik, but your contract gets renewed for 3 years. Interestingly, it used to be possible to get multiple connections at the same house (like, literally, multiple fiber cables). Not sure if that's still possible and what the limit was per individual/house, but I always wondered if one could get something ridiculous like 4000/4000 Mbps aggregate speed. And yes, the upload speeds are true, although their own routers won't reach them. But good news, you can use any router with an SFP transceiver. I am not aware of anything like the private networks created in Romania by individuals. There are a few other ISPs that started early, and technically competed with Moldtelecom (the state run ISP) with their own cables, but they did not operate outside the capital for a very long time. Moldtelecom had a monopoly. There used to be a lot of Internet cafes that everyone would use for LAN gaming and Internet browsing, it was fun. This might be the best thing the government has done in the country since independence, I don't know what motivations they had, they didn't seem to be lobbied by anyone since there were no Internet startups with significant influence. They just sort of... did it. If anyone knows more about the history of Internet in the Republic of Moldova, please comment. Now there's talks of selling Moldtelecom to Huawei, which might be a bad idea. They already use Huawei equipment, just not sure what they would do if they buy the whole company. |