Rant 1

I know I said I would not rant too much but Etisalat (local ISP, telco and mobile monopoly) are now totally pi**ing me off.
Three days after an excuse that few totally believe we still cannot access secure sites fast enough to avoid time outs, I have some secure access many seem to have no access at all.
The help line is a recorded message saying it's all someone else's fault and still the service is utter rubbish 3 days on with no end in sight.
The original release was that a nasty foreign fisherman had cut the cable but to be honest if they had a resilient network and agreements to add bandwidth, losing one cable would not matter.
As it is why bother with resilience, why bother apologies, why explain, why (dare i say it) refund our extortionate fees? After all we have nowhere to go, ah the joys of the monopoly and its as yet unborn little brother Son of Etisacrap (the story remains the same).
Practically it means that trying to book a ticket on a French train has become impossible, now this may be a pretty rare task, but for me right now it's bloody vital, the very slow speed of the secure service (even from our 2 Mb connection at work) means the site time outs before accepting credit card details.
"No problem" you say, "our friendly travel agent system will do the booking for you." Well there is one agent, Al Rostamani and they would be happy to help, except they do the booking on the internet and there is this problem with Etisalat........
Sometimes it feels as if this place totters on the edge of joining the first world but then fails by restricting competition which exposes much of the gloss as being, frankly, a set of emperor's clothes.
They really do need to get this fixed or many UAE businesses will be counting the cost, Dubai inc loses more credibility, oh and I will be stranded in France in 10 days time.
DW