Why Belgium sucks for us geeks

All belgian geeks know it, they think it, but they just don't say it enough:

This country sucks if you're a geek

There are 3 main reasons to say this: first of all there's the huge problem we have with our two major ISP's, they for some mystic reason think they need to limit our down and upload capacity. Reason number two is digital television: digital television in Belgium is delivered by - who would have guessed - the two ISP's. It is delivered in a non standard way and the cost is way to high. The last major frustration on my mind is the iPhone, while almost every geek in Europe will be able to buy this nifty gadget on July 11th, Belgians will have to wait till "date unknown".

ISP troubles

Years ago nobody would complain about ISP's limiting your bandwidth when you downloaded too much, but if you look at the plans ISP's in most countries offer, almost everything is unlimited. In Belgium things are different, the cost for a decent cable or ADSL connection are rather high and include a limit on the down and uploading you do.
The ISP that is responsible for internet connection over Cable is Telenet (also referred to as teleslut), telenet offers a plan that has a 10mbps down 256kbps up connection and has a limit of down- and uploading that's only 12GB a month. 12GB is nothing in this age of digital media.
Belgacom, the ISP that offers ADSL connections is doing even worse, the connection is a slow 4.4mbps down and I don't even want to talk about the upload speeds. In this case there's also a cap on the down- and uploads.
for years people have been complaining about these limitations and the price that is payed when you exceed them. Watching Quicktime HD trailers is not done because of this, downloading a lot of podcasts is just not possible because of this, and the list of frustrations caused by those silly limitations goes on.
there is an alternative though, there are smaller ISP's who offer unlimited connections for a reasonable amount of money but then again those services are less reliable and depend on the infrastructure of the two big ISP's.

Digital television

Analog cable television is getting old and the image you get on an LCD or plasma TV is just not what you want. Luckily there is a good new way of getting the broadcasted video on your nice flat television screen. Digital video broadcasting is the way of the future and in the USA it is allready widespread and has become a standard for almost every household.

In Belgium, things are - again - a bit different. First of all the way digital television is delivered to households is not done in a standards compliant way, everything is encrypted and you need a specific set top box made and sold solely by your provider. So you can already forget about a tuner card in your media center pc.

There are three providers who can offer you a way to watch this digital tv goodness but only one of them offers HD channels and it's only available in few parts of the country. Most households will use Telenet digital tv of Belgacom tv, this last one is far the worst. It uses the 4.4mbps ADSL connection to stream the video from its servers and this causes a lot of trouble with delays on the video or just a lot of downtime. Telenet is doing a better job but there's no HD content so what you get is a progressive image instead of the interlaced analog madness you normally get.

The worst thing that annoys me the most though is that it is all not standards compliant and that I can't use my own DTV tuner in my pc or the one that was built into my 50" plasma tv. I have to use an ugly designed cheap set-top box that adds another remote control to my collection.

iPhone 3G

When Steve Jobs announced the 3G iphone and I saw the name "Belgium" appear on one of his slides I was really happy, happy to know that by July 11th I would be able to go to a store and buy myself this long awaited over hyped gadget. But when I visited apple.be a few days later, the launch date had disappeared and Mobistar (the provider that will sell the iPhone in Belgium) had made clear that it would not ship the iPhone 3G on July 11th.
Suddenly Belgium was in the list that would be selling the device "later this year", together with countries like Botswana and Qatar.

Its a disappointment when you now all the countries surrounding you will be abl to enjoy the many features of the iPhone while you're still using a crappy ill-designed GSM.

Mobistar announced that on the 4th of July it would announce the date and the pricing of the long awaited iPhone, I'm looking forward to what they have to say but it should've been 11/07/08 !