A S H Smyth

No. 2 in the World!

Friday, August 19, 2022

… for most expensive internet

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In a report published last week by the South American business analysis website BN Americas, it was stated that the Falkland Islands has the most expensive mobile data in South America, and the second-most-expensive in the world.

In a run-down of data costs carried out by British price-comparison firm Cable.co.uk over the months of April and May this year, over 5000 mobile data plans were analysed, worldwide.

BN Americas’ focus was on the 1000 or so price plans available in the Caribbean, and Central and South America.

According to Cable, in Central America one gigabyte of mobile data costs, on average, £1.55.* Caribbean prices are significantly higher, at £2.85 on average; but even the Cayman Islands, the most expensive of the group, costs little more than £8.50 per gigabyte.

South America is more expensive again, averaging £3.38 across the region. Prices in Uruguay (22p), Colombia (41p) and Chile (42p) are among the cheapest in the world; but the stats are skewed for the entire continent almost solely because in the Falkland Islands, 1GB of mobile data costs, on average, almost £32. Across the rest of South America, it was considered notable if prices exceeded 83 pence – or US$1 – per gigabyte.

Numbers provided by local monopoly telecoms-provider Sure suggest the cost of mobile data in the Falklands is actually even higher. On a pay-as-you-go SIM, the cost of 1GB of mobile data would be £40, the same as the (£40) medium contract package which includes 1GB of data along with 350 minutes and 70 texts. (Sure were not able to tell us what that data was worth separated from the other items.)

Either way, this makes the Falklands the second-most-expensive mobile data market in the world – only two pounds cheaper per gigabyte than St Helena. These costs are well over double the price paid in the 4^th-placed South Pacific atoll of Tokelau, and 5^th-placed war-torn Yemen. Top-of-the-table Israel charges 3.3 pence per gigabyte, 1000 times less expensive than the Falkland Islands. At 12p per gigabyte, even the remote island nation of Fiji is more than 265 times cheaper.

BN Americas also suggested that 1GB of data should cost the equivalent of 2% of average monthly income – with the additional onus on operators to be charging that same amount for five gigabytes by 2026.

This goal was put forward, last year, by the Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) – part of the Web Foundation, and with a membership roster including tech giants, social media platforms, and USAID – which ‘promotes the affordability of mobile broadband in low- and middle-income countries’.

A4AI calls 1GB of affordable mobile data a month an ‘entry’ package – this is in developing nations, NB – and in any case pronounces that ‘a gigabyte of data is not enough’. They call for more affordable access, and ‘public policies focussed on lowering costs.’

According to Cable analyses, several Central American countries had prices lower than the regional average, albeit still exceeding 5% of average incomes nationally. But from Mexico south, nine countries already offer as much as two gigabytes for the benchmark 2% of monthly income, and three nations – Brazil, Peru, and Argentina – offer five. In many countries in the region, 5GB of mobile data costs little or no more than 1.

While many of these are impoverished and/or developing nations, the Falklands is not. According to the 2016 census, the average per capita income was £23,142pa – and so at £38.57 the cost of 1GB of mobile data is more or less (depending whose numbers you use) 2% of average monthly income. But Sure’s biggest available phone package here only extends to 3GB of mobile data, and at £65, costs more like 3.5% of income. 5GB would cost at least £105 (on £65 contract, plus four 500MB data boosters), or almost 5.5%. On pay-as-you-go, it would come to £190, or very nearly 11% of average monthly income.

All of these studies, what’s more, refer only to the simple price of mobile data – not to speeds, coverage, or any other potential measures of data accessibility.

Citing various studies, the Alliance for Affordable Internet argues that greater broadband access could help contribute economically, a 2019 study by the International Telecommunication Union suggesting that a 10% increase in mobile broadband penetration would lead to 1.2% growth in GDP in the Americas.

*all prices converted from US dollars to pounds on Tuesday this week

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For Falklands Radio

Filed in feature, Journalism | Tagged Alliance for Affordable Internet, Argentina, BN Americas, Brazil, Central America, Chile, Colombia, communications, development, Falklands Radio, Fiji, International Telecommunication Union, Israel, Mexico, money, news, Peru, public policy, social media, South America, St Helena, Sure, the Caribbean, the Cayman Islands, the Falklands, the internet, Tokelau, Uruguay, USAID | Comments (0)

Fun and Games

Thursday, July 28, 2022

I’m not saying the Falklands is a tiny place, but… in the course of one day, last month, in the newly-anointed city of Stanley, I had my hair cut by one international athlete and then my passport processed by another.

Soon-to-be international athletes, anyway. They’re both part of the Islands’ team for this year’s Commonwealth Games, which opens in Birmingham at 8pm this evening.

The Falklands has despatched 16 competitors across four sports: badminton, table tennis, cycling, and – that game of kings – lawn bowls. For most, this is their first Commonwealth Games. For some, thanks largely to Covid, the second-biggest sporting event in the world will be their debut international experience!

The youngest, 15-year-old Ben Chater, has not only never competed internationally before, but has only ever played badminton in one place: the Stanley leisure centre. (I taught him English for a chunk of last year, so shall be making much of this connection if he ‘podiums’.)

Javier Sotomayor (table tennis – and my stylist), moved here over a decade ago, and has been the Islands’ table tennis champion for four years running. I think it’s fair to say the Falklands whiff-whaff scene is not enormous – he qualified through the ‘Americas’(??) regional wildcard system – and Javier’s our solitary men’s player (the same number as Jersey, Kenya, and Papua New Guinea). Mind you, hairdressers are in short supply here too: I hope he doesn’t end up turning pro.

At 46, Head of the Immigration Dept. Jim Horton (time trial and road race) is not merely making his international debut but is the first cyclist ever to race for the Falkland Islands – which given that there’s only about 40 miles of tarmac’d road outside of Stanley is maybe not entirely surprising. Jim actually hails from the Black Country; but now his main fear is that he’ll be caught riding round his former neighbourhood leaning manically into stiff, but totally imaginary, winds. I taught his son, too, now I think of it.

Ben’s aunt Vicky Chater (badminton again), is the co-owner/manager of my daughter’s nursery, and had a (second) child of her own a little over eight months ago! She’ll be competing in the ‘clean sweep’ of ladies singles, ladies doubles, and mixed doubles. Another badmintoner, Doug Clark (fresh in from training camp in Denmark), is the son of one of my more – most? – venerable DJing colleagues, a Royal Marine who served here back in 1982. Doug is on his seventh Commonwealth Games, and in his spare time spent eight years as captain of the national football team. Earlier this month he was selected as one of the party’s two flag-bearers, “a once in a lifetime opportunity.”

Soraye March has been playing badminton since she was five years old (she’s only 17 now), and in one of her five international appearances she’s met local fly-boy war hero Prince Edward – which is nothing to her dad, Duane (47, one previous Commonwealth), who’s had a one-to-one with the Queen. Their mum and wife, respectively, Cheryl, is in the team, too, in both the mixed and ladies doubles. Talented bunch.

Daphne Arthur-Almond (lawn bowls) was one of the first people I met in the Falklands, singing at a one-off evensong in February 2021. She’s competed internationally on two occasions: at the World Indoor Bowls Championships in Bristol three months ago, and once in 1985, at the Asian Games – for netball! I was delighted to hear she’ll share flag-bearing honours with Doug.

Even among the bowlers, Daphne’s age-to-playing-career ratio (30:1) is at the higher end; but she’s in excellent company. Garry Tyrell is on his third international sport – after cricket and football – and his claim to fame (til now) is to have been the oldest cup-winning goal-scorer (>40) in the Falklands, after the goalie saved his airborne boot instead of the ball. Ex-mariner and harbour master Chris Locke has loads of medals and was at the 2012 Olympics – though, alas, the two are, as yet, unrelated (he was volunteering in Danny Boyle’s opening extravaganza).

The team’s match balls have (naturally) cute penguins on them. But while the snow dumps down here, in the austral winter, our bowlers have been training in extremely sunny Oxfordshire. (There’ve been a lot of quite uncalled-for photos of their knees.) Primary school teacher and bowls team junior Andrea Stanworth had not yet joined them, last I heard (termtime continues). A 12-year resident, Andrea only took the sport up in the last 12 months. She was too polite to tell me whom she’d beaten in the qualifying stages, so I can’t say if there were months of vicious prelims or if in fact she’s never played at all. But what I do know is there are no ‘lawns’ here in the Falklands Islands (OK – the Governor has one; but it’s been white for weeks now), so bowls is played exclusively indoors, on roll-out carpets. If Andrea’s RAF flight is delayed (hardly unheard of), she may yet bowl her first ball on grass in the opening round of one of the world’s most-widely-televised sporting events.

Given the proportion of the population which they represent, what’s perhaps more surprising about the Falklands Commonwealth contingent is how many of them I don’t know. I wonder if 16 competitors out of a civilian population of 3,000 might not itself be notable, in international sport? By comparison, England would need to send a team of about 275,000. (They’re sending 440.)

Also noteworthy is the diverse make-up of the Islands’ Games contingent. A recent Multicultural Day here featured cuisine and cultural displays from 61 nations, and both competitors and backroom staff are reflective of the many and various points of origin, as well as the broadly outward-looking ethos of the modern Islands.

The March family are from St Helena, originally. Laura Harada (also badminton) has, as she puts it, ‘a Japanese surname and Chinese family heritage’. Javier was born and grew up in Chile.

Lawn bowls manager Cecil Alexander, like any good South African, is involved in every sport that you can shake a stick at, and several where that’s not allowed. He too competed in the World Indoor Bowls Championships, with Daphne, and is Javier’s ping-pong training partner. Chef de mission Andrew Brownlee MBE (and also JP) came here from Britain in 1981, and rose to be, among a host of other things, a Captain in the Falklands Islands Defence Force (FIDF).

Jim’s UK-based cycling coach, Simon Fenton, used to work here, at the nation’s single bank (fun fact: the nation also has one solitary cash machine. They’re not in the same place). And Sarfraz Rao – from Pakistan, the current Standard Chartered chief executive – plays cricket, organises marathons, and is the table-tennis coach/manager. Even our press attaché, Oliver Thompson (West Yorks), made the indoor bowls team last year for the (Covid-postponed) Island Games in Guernsey.

For the next couple of weeks, though, all of them will be 8000 miles from where they now call home. As I write, the team have checked in at the Athletes Village, had a welcome from their ‘mayor’, champion javeliniste Tessa Sanderson CBE, been met by a flood of encouraging letters sent over from the Infant Junior School in Stanley, and started friendly warm-up matches versus Fiji, Ghana, and (the even smaller!) Norfolk Island.

In a Christmas message last year, Boris Johnson congratulated the Falklands on being admitted as a full member of the International Table Tennis Federation. But every silver lining has its cloud, and these remarks alone were met with a torrent of complaints from Buenos Aires, who had – with wearying inevitability – tried to prevent the membership. “It says an awful lot,” remarks Andy Brownlee, “that the rest of the world are not politicising sport.’ But The Old Issue rumbles on, apparently ad infinitum.

In the run-up to the recent 40^th-anniversary commemorations of the Falklands War I interviewed a handful of veteran members of the FIDF, including Gerald Cheek. A sergeant on the night of the Argentinian invasion, and subsequently interned by the occupying forces, he told me how, in late 1982, he travelled to Australia as the Islands’ joint-first Commonwealth Games competitor (in full-bore rifle shooting – somewhat fittingly). They were surprised to find that they were mobbed by press, given medals by one Charlton Heston(!), and indeed to discover, after the tournament, that they had been, throughout, under the watchful eye of close protection details – in case, Gerald presumes, our South Atlantic neighbours attempted some kind of insane reprisal. But not half as surprised as when they walked into the Brisbane stadium, bearing the Falklands sheep-and-ship flag, to hear the place erupt in international, comradely support.

ASH Smyth was once selected to play cricket for the Falkland Islands. He couldn’t make it.

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For Spectator Life, in a rather shorter edit

Filed in correspondence, Journalism | Tagged Falkland Islands, The Spectator | Comments (0)

News At A Glance #15

Friday, July 8, 2022

On Georgia(n)s, music, and the state of education.

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For The Emigre

Filed in Journalism, NEWS AT A GLANCE | Tagged Belarusians, books, drink, education, employment, Falklands Radio, fish, Georgia, humour, Islam, Karl Marx, marriage, Michelle Donelan, mobility, Nelson Evening Mail, novels, Pakistan, racism, Reuben Harwood, Russians, sex, South Africans, the apocalypse, The Emigre, the UK, theremins, Turkey, Twitter, Ukrainians | Comments (0)

Late stylishness

Thursday, July 7, 2022

The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings
By Geoff Dyer
(Audiobook read by Richard Burnip, 11h 29m, Canongate Books, £21.87)

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It’s late June, Wimbledon’s upon us, and Geoff Dyer is talking about his tennis injuries.

Geoff Dyer is always talking about his tennis injuries. It’s one of his endearing features. But when I saw he had a book forthcoming with ‘last days’ and ‘endings’ in the title – and blurbed, what’s more, as ‘a summation of [his] passions’ – I feared perhaps he might be on his way out.

His publisher assured me this was not so: at least, no more than the rest of us. In fact, The Last Days… finds the 60-something flâneur on fine (not to say ‘sprightly’) form.

He begins, with typically Dyerish mischief, at ‘The End’ – ‘the last track on the Doors’ first album’ (you can almost hear him wondering whether he’d prefer ‘The End’ wasn’t indeed the Doors’ last live song ever) – and the next ten (micro-)chapters take in Bob Dylan, Venice Beach, the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, George Best, retirement, Gillian Slovo, the Olympics, TC Boyle, football, and Martin Scorsese. Even Andy bloody Murray (the ‘mumble-core Hamlet’) gets a look in before poor Roger Federer.

But Geoff Dyer has established Views about his books being ‘about’ something (he was supposed to write a book ‘about’ tennis about ten years ago…). Likewise on subtitles/straplines. So Dyer afficionados won’t be at all surprised to find that while he gets to Federer eventually (kind of; not really), notionally abetted by the constraints of lockdown, mainly this is a book about – or from the viewpoint of – ‘my own experience of the changes wrought by ageing.’

There are all the lates: the late fame of Jean Rhys; first encountering the music of Gillian Welch ‘embarrassingly late – after David Cameron, even’; De Chirico’s late ‘phase’ (most of his life); fans leaving the stadium early and so missing a late reversal; Tennyson seemingly always late in his – or someone else’s – day.

And unfinisheds: Turner’s paintings (in the view of some of his contemporaries); Bjorn Borg’s failed comebacks; giving up on Anthony PJohn Berger, owell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (e.g.) before you waste too much of your own time on it.

And then the lasts: Nietzsche’s horrendous final years; Custer’s ‘stand’; Mohicans, tangos in Paris, songs; James Last (only kidding); the psycho-social trauma of the last train on London nights out; one-final-heist films; and the last set in a tennis match, a sport in which famously the last point is the only one that really matters.

And in his own line of work? Dyer has lately got into late Beethoven, but ‘I deliberately left late [Henry] James – let alone what one scholar calls “late late James” – for later, and now it’s too late.’ He ‘worries’ – of course – he might have left this book too late. John Coltrane, he notes, died so fast that he had no time for ‘late’. (Now that I think of it, we never do get to the ‘late’-ness of dead people being ‘late’.)

So this is classic (late) Dyer, a writer whose ranging (‘rangy’?) intellect was, mercifully, prevented from ‘progressing’ beyond the stage of voracious undergrad, and who is, as a result, as likely to quote the script of Heat as Raymond Williams. All his more-enthusiastically-ridden hobby horses are present as per – John Berger, WWII, DH Lawrence, jazz, drugs, Tarkovsky, Burning Man, Rebecca West – and as Dyer goes from Al Pacino to Gerard Manley Hopkins to Chuck Yeager in as many, or fewer, sentences (Mike Tyson is directly compared to Philip Larkin), you’re never entirely sure if this is brilliant exegesis or a bored and over-clever grammar-school boy taking the piss. Who else but Dyer would call the too-heavy impact of skunk ‘the Gesamtkunstwerk effect’?

This is half the fun, of course – and more so for the author, one suspects. No doubt he isn’t kidding when he says he believes David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film to be ‘the great literary achievement of our time.’ But for all the gems of bona fine criticism, either artistic (the ‘idyllic quality’ of the post-apocalyptic movie; third-rate statuary as ‘one of the rewards of achieving nationhood’), or social (the contrary grandiosity of asking an American lady to ‘call me Geoff’; the frantic desire of even the most artsy crowd to hit the bar), Dyer’s business is always scrupulously conducted with one eye on ‘the trusty old ponce-ometer’, from the unabashed dad-puns (‘it’s my neck that’s been the Achilles heel’) to the faux-chippy digs (that Pete Sampras shared with the grass on which he played an ‘incapacity for epistemological enquiry’). ‘Wouldn’t it be marvellous,’ he ends his first section, ‘if it were possible to be a serious writer without taking oneself at all seriously.’ There is no question mark, NB.

With all the contrivances and call-backs and shameless segues – whether conveniently reading Peter Akroyd’s biography of Turner on a train, or embarking on a ‘quasi-Pharaonic’ scheme of pilfering shampoo from hotels – it would be difficult, it occurs to me, to spoof Geoff Dyer at much less than a full book’s length. And there’s always a moment – often a couple – where even the keenest Dyerist must fear that he’s begun to get high on the smell of his own farts (here it’s William Basinkski’s avant-garde music, loo roll, and 9/11)… but then he pulls it back, with a delighted grin, and you’re almost-grudgingly impressed.

Still, if you’re not a fan of the perambulatory style and what, elsewhere, were termed his ‘Anglo-English attitudes’, then The Last Days of Roger Federer is probably not for you. It’s been suggested that the book is 84,600 words long (I didn’t – couldn’t – count them), which happens to be the number of seconds in a (Groundhog) day. And given quite how many nods there are to things Dyer’s written whole other volumes about – or ‘about’ – previously (he openly names at least two of them), one can hardly be blamed for seeing Dyer’s books themselves – from sentence-structure to the Gesamtwerk level – as a cheerful, ironist’s homage to Nietzsche’s concept of ‘Eternal Recurrence’. The ‘Eternal Reference’, perhaps.

On which… References, attributions, and the like pose obvious production difficulties in the audiosphere (George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo was completely unlistenable); but epigraphs and footnotes are key Dyer accoutrements, and for these to be respectively unadvertised (essentially ‘inaudible’) and out of place a) sounds most odd, and b) restricts the sheer divagatory Dyerishness of the whole project.

Worse, Richard Burnip appears to have no idea what Geoff Dyer sounds like. Granted, narrators are not here to do impersonations; but this one hasn’t caught the author’s calm, sardonic voice at all. There is no grin. My guess is that he’s never read a Dyer book before, or even seen The Great JM Coetzee Joke. The result is all-too sincere, loud, and urgent – like Jorah Mormont doing Health & Safety ads.

But such is life – and while it lasts, both on and off the court, Geoff Dyer ‘still love[s] everything about tennis.’ And if ‘ultimately, tennis, like life itself, is just a wet T-shirt contest in the pouring rain, signifying nothing,’ then ‘I’m glad I’m old, old enough to not mind staying in, sitting round here revising this book, remembering all this old poetry, watching the latest compilations of Roger’s best dropshots on YouTube…’

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For Perspective

Filed in Journalism, review | Tagged 9/11, Achilles, age, Al Pacino, Alfred Tennyson, Americans, Andy Murray, Anthony Powell, audiobooks, Beethoven, Bjorn Borg, Bob Dylan, Burning Man, Canongate, Chuck Yeager, Coetzee, Custer, David Cameron, David Thomson, De Chirico, death, DH Lawrence, drugs, epigraphs, football, footnotes, Geoff Dyer, George Best, George Saunders, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gillian Slovo, Gillian Welch, health and safety, Henry James, humour, James Last, jazz, Jean Rhys, JMW Turner, John Berger, John Coltrane, Jorah Mormont, London, loo roll, Martin Scorsese, Mike Tyson, Mohicans, Nietzsche, non-fiction, Paris, Pete Sampras, Peter Ackroyd, Philip Larkin, Raymond Williams, Rebecca West, references, Richard Burnip, Roger Federer, shampoo, Tarkovsky, TC Boyle, tennis, The Doors, the Duke of Edinburgh's Award, the Olympics, trains, William Basinski, Wimbledon, work, WWII, YouTube | Comments (0)

News At A Glance #14

Friday, July 1, 2022

Men vs women; reaching St Peter; couscous; and Finnish conductors. It’s all go in this week’s ‘News At A Glance’!

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For The Emigre

Filed in Journalism, NEWS AT A GLANCE | Tagged 1812, cats, conducting, couscous, e-gaming, Englishness, health and safety, injuries, Koreans, London, men, Minnesota, Nelson Evening Mail, neuralgia, news, nostalgia, Poland, Poles, Polish, Rome, South Georgia, St Peter, The Emigre, the Finns, the Tour de France, women | Comments (0)

On Uncertain Ground

Tuesday, June 28, 2022

In which I, ASH Smyth, High Anglican atheist, descendant of Huguenots, dissenters, Presbyterians, Church of Ireland types, and maybe even Quakers, make my Catholic press debut, on Phil Klay’s Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War.

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For The Catholic Herald