Goodbye Tepsa... :)

What Bartek and his family have been waiting for almost four years will come to a pass tomorrow. We’ll finally part company with the biggest national provider of internet access and landline phone services. Like many Poles we’ll confine to using mobile phones only. Our new internet provider will be… I’ve endorsed that company too many times so the careful readers will surely guess what the choice was. The new connection will be a bit faster, wireless, partly mobile (the coverage is not nationwide, but limited to 500 cities as the operator declares) and much cheaper. The drawback will be transfer limit imposed by the provider – although five gigabytes allows one to surf the web conveniently, downloading more than one or two films a months is up in the air.

A decade ago having a mobile phone in Poland was an extravagance. Since then the call charges have fallen by 85 per cent, handsets have become much more affordable so the penetration (number of mobile phones per citizen) of the market exceeded 100 per cent – everyone has a mobile these days, including pensioners, children from nursery school, drunkards, even the homeless. Meanwhile the landline, still regarded as a basic form of providing telecommunication services tends to be luxurious and maintenance costs are unreasonable. Currently the cheapest monthly plan of Telekompromitacja Polska S.A. costs 50 zł (unless you can submit the slip from local social welfare centre (Ośrodek pomocy społecznej) – then you’ll get the cheaper one, for 18,30 zł) and includes 60 minutes to national landlines. Ludicrous – for sixty minutes of calls to the landlines from my mobile phone I’d pay 3 zł. TP S.A. will charge you round seventeen times more for such doubtful pleasure. Doubtful for sake of the quality of calls, cracking, humming and other noises are what you should expect to hear in your receiver.

Below: the “infrastructure” of TP along my street…


Infrastructure is the official term for those strings tied up together and hanging on the concrete posts. To the left – white box attached to the post – a makeshift device used in 2005 to connect my house to the line, the wires run downwards to the white pipe, also fixed to the post. In the middle, just in front of the lamppost one can notice a beautiful hook-shaped object and one of the wires hanging down – this is the trace of the breakdown caused by Kiryll hurricane in January 2007. To the right – the rusty pipe through which the wire to my neighbours’ house runs. Makeshift all the way, don’t pay too much attention to the stonemason’s plant at the opposite side of the street. They’ll never tidy up there, it’s a matter of mentality, they don’t mind the squalor ('dziadostwo' in the “rightest” context)…

When inquired about the lack of investments in infrastructure in our locality, TP representatives replied according to their calculations it wouldn’t be cost-effective to put the wires underground, so it will stay like this until it falls apart. Such stance means that locals will be deprived of the access to the fast Internet for years – the capacity of such infrastructure is 700 – 800 kbps, what in two or three years will not be classified as broadband connection. In the West 10 to 20 Mbps becomes a standard, in Poland UPC is the provider which develops its infrastructure to provide its clients with such speed of connection, TP does nothing to improve its services. Moreover – its representatives claim their activity is barely profitable, only the price for the end-user is exorbitant. It’s the main reason why so many people turn them away. Assuming that customers’ decisions are based on cool calculation and common sense, the number of TP individual clients should drop drastically within the next five or ten years. French owners milk their cash cow to the limits, but one day the cow will die…