Connecting in Corfu

IA discussion occurred, on the message boards on my friend Nathan's website www.agni.gr, about internet access.

It was suggested that there was no effective broadband connections on the island, ISDN being the fastest. I had taken this to mean anywhere but l now think this was relating to home connections.

Having been in to the capital have found an excellent cybercafe. The cafe is called GCom and has around 30 computers with large screens, the connection "feels" like my 512Mb connection at home. A lot of users might impact but there were 10 others in at 3 - 4pm when I used it. I subscribe to 50+ podcasts and was able to download.5 at a time, while surfing sites such as bloglines, with no major delays.

In addition to the speedy connection, headphone and, for some reason a scanner for each machine, it did not close for siesta. The building is air conditioned and has coffee shop facility with reasonably priced drinks - we had a couple of frapés this time around. (The tip for frapés when you want it as a refreshing drink, in my experience, is to not have it 'me gala' (with milk). I was asked whether I wanted it with milk and foolishly said yes. The frapé was more like a milkshake and not as refreshing as the frapé I had at the Liston.

When not at the cybercafe, I have relied on my phone to keep me in touch with people via email on GPRS. A big problem with using GPRS is that it's a good deal more expensive when using a UK sim card, in my case 10 times more expensive. Even with the expense I find it much better in terms of cost and speed in comparison to dial-up on the mobile. Email headers only take 1k or so and plain text emails aren't too bad to send. I notice that attachments don't make it to my mobile blogger.com account. Strange, but I'll send them when back in UK.

Corfu has so far given me 5 full bars of phone signal, pretty much everywhere along the West coast.

I'll end here, a long post without pictures.

Yamas