So it’s not just my imagination, Turkey really does have the most expensive broadband in the world. As Cem points out, it’s not surprising to anyone who lives in Turkey, but it is surprising in the context of the general cost of living here, which is extremely low. Internet cafés are cheaper than in other countries (our neighbourhood one charges 1.50YTL an hour), but if you want internet in your home it’s gonna set you back. We’re currently paying more for a 512k connection than I was paying for a 3mbit connection in England 3 years ago. And our provider here doesn’t even offer a service as fast as 3mbit— 2mbit is the fastest available, and the monthly fee for that is nearly as much as we pay in apartment rent. So much for my live vlogging idea.
But the truth is, if people want something, they’ll find a way to pay for it whether it’s expensive or not. When I left the United States for good in 1998, gas was just over a dollar a gallon in Texas, and I could fill up my Tercel for less than $20 and still have money left for a burrito (incidentally, I miss burritos like you wouldn’t believe, but I digress). When I got to England, I shocked friends and family back home by reporting that gas there was over $5 a gallon and climbing steadily. Friends told me, “if gas were that expensive here, I wouldn’t buy it, I’d just give up my car.” Ha, sure you would. I’m certain it won’t be long before gas is that expensive in the United States, and so far I don’t see any of my friends throwing their keys away. The same is true of internet. Like cars in Texas (where there is next to no public transportation), for many of us the internet is such a key navigational tool through modern life that it almost becomes a necessity. Were it not for the internet it would certainly be nearly impossible for me to keep up with friends and family in my previous homes, and given the difficulty in finding English-language media in stores here (books, music, television, film), without international online shopping and downloadable products I might have long ago gone crazy from a feeling of alienation and isolation (though my Turkish would almost certainly be a lot better than it is).
I think what it comes down to is that for those of us living the nomadic lifestyle, the internet is the one country we can use as a constant homebase, and despite the fact that access charges vary wildly from place to place, you pay what you have to pay to have access to the parts of the world you want to have access to. I’m not quite willing to pay $160 a month for 2mbit, but I keep being told those prices will come down soon. In fact, they’ve already come down quite a bit— the 2mbit was $190 a month up until May of this year. Yeah, I know it’s shocking, but it’s even more shocking when you consider that many working class people here only make about twice that amount in total monthly salary. It’s amazing Turks can afford internet at all.
There are numerous baseball lovers everywhere. You can easily find thousands of fans of Boston Red Sox and why not this Boston based team is world series champion. For the baseball lovers there are a number of free baseball games available on Internet, which you can play online or download to your computers.
July 27th, 2007 at 20:01 pm
it’s true. when i flew into the uk via paris, on the way in for my 1 hour layover i scoffed at paying 12 euros for an hour or two of internet. on the way home when i had 4 hours? you can bet i coughed it up even though it meant having no money for food once i got back to the states!
July 27th, 2007 at 21:08 pm
Hi, I have been following you for a while. You are so right. The internet can make a huge difference for people living far away from family.. and friends. I often wonder how it would have been for me just to have msn for an example when I lived in Denmark for 15 years, and had all my family here in Iceland. Except my husband who was danish and then of course my children. Most of the time I lived in Denmark was before internet. The last couple of years we had email. And that made a huge difference. But almost no blogs and certainly no msn. Now my children spend a few weeks every summer in Denmark with their father, but they are only a click away. Well I sure am happy we have the internet now, especially when the children are in Denmark.
July 28th, 2007 at 01:12 am
Is it my imagination or did my comment just disappear or something?
July 28th, 2007 at 01:14 am
I give up.
July 28th, 2007 at 09:02 am
@alli: yeah, airport layovers are the worst… I did the same in Chicago even though O’Hare is a great airport. There’s still only so much you can do before you start to get bored.
July 28th, 2007 at 09:05 am
@Frida: I have another friend who lives in Denmark who implied that Denmark (except in Copenhagen) is particularly bad for expats, very few resources to give foreigners any rememberences of home, even if they’re from other places in Europe. He said it was a lot easier when he was living in Spain. So not only did you have to deal with no internet, you had to do it in one of the least expat-ready places (apparently). It must have been very difficult.
July 28th, 2007 at 09:06 am
@Volkan: what happened? Sorry if there was some kind of glitch - I never got a comment notification from you, except of course for the two comments at 01:12 and 01:14. Any chance of you reposting? I always find your comments insightful.
July 30th, 2007 at 21:54 pm
I read this the other day about Turkey. Couldn’t believe it.
July 31st, 2007 at 04:38 am
…for those of us living the nomadic lifestyle, the internet is the one country we can use as a constant homebase.
so true. there’s something comforting about knowing people all over the world are just a mouse-click away. no matter where we are, we’re as far away as the nearest IM, blog, or chatroom!
July 31st, 2007 at 13:16 pm
Melissa, any idea if Turkish ISP’s offer contention on their lines or have bandwidth limits? In the UK prices for broadband have dropped, but at the same time the number of people sharing the same line (contention) has increased, and the amount of bandwidth you can actually use has dropped.
Now its not uncommon to get a cheap 8-24 mb line, but with a limitation of only 20 gigs per month (so forget Joost and Bittorrent). So in that light, sure broadband is getting cheaper, but there are far more limits than there were when you had a 1 mb line with unlimited data just 3-4 years ago.
August 1st, 2007 at 12:45 pm
@JB: yeah, you’d think with everything else being so cheap here… but no.
August 1st, 2007 at 12:53 pm
@Thelma: I can’t imagine all those people who moved to Australia from England in the early 20th century… can you imagine the feeling of isolation, being on the other side of the world? I’d probably go crazy.
August 1st, 2007 at 12:55 pm
@Geoffrey: you can choose here between limited and unlimited bandwidth, but the prices aren’t really that different, and if you choose the limited one you have a limit of 3GB per month. Me personally, it would take me a couple of days to bust right through that, and the overage charges are hefty, and from what I understand they don’t warn you when you’re getting close to the limit. So we just played it safe and went for the unlimited.
August 1st, 2007 at 15:25 pm
[...] A few days I commented on Cem Sertoğlu’s report of Turkey having the most expensive broadband in the world. [...]
August 3rd, 2007 at 21:06 pm
Hey in Eskişehir in Turkey some cafes charge 0.4 ytl for an hour.
August 6th, 2007 at 19:36 pm
[...] (Böyle bir çalışmanın daha dar örneklemlisini geçen yıl yapmak istiyordum ama zaman olmadı, bu çalışmayı da çıkar çıkmaz SortiPreneur blogundan, o blogu da Melissa Maples‘ın blogundan buldum) [...]
August 7th, 2007 at 10:43 am
@ferhad: wow, that’s fantastic! I wish we had prices like that here.