Caye Caulker-Island Internet Adventures
When we first came to Caye Caulker, we stayed at my friend’s house on the North Caye which she generously offered to us while we got settled. The North Caye is a much more undeveloped island than the south, but her house was across the road from the Koko King resort.
My friend’s house might be generously described as Belizean rustic country. It was originally one room which she first elevated to around 12’ and had a set of stairs and porch added. Then she had a sleeping porch added that was enclosed with screen. There were no glass windows in the main room as we would have in the states, but rather metal shutters with a screen inside to keep out the mosquitoes.
The first order of business after we moved in was getting the internet set up. On Caye Caulker you have two possible choices. The first is Smart which the majority of the island is on. The reason is because in order to have the Smart Internet, all you have to have is a line of sight connection to the radio tower on the south island. Consequently, living on the north island our only choice was Smart.
As I said, the first order of business after arriving was going to Belize City to get our phones set up on a local plan and to order internet service. This was all a learning experience for us. We’re used to the states where you order something and they come out and install it on the day they said in the time window they tell you.
Here we were told that we needed to buy a 20’ steel pipe for the dish. The dish has to have a clear line of sight to the tower and the technician attaches the pipe to the side of the house to raise it high enough to have that line of sight.
But let me back up here to describe the challenges of living on the north caye at that time. Almost all the stores and restaurants are on the south island which meant that you either had to have a boat, or hire a boat, or catch a ride on the Koko King ferry. Koko King had a boat that ran back and forth several times a day between their dock and the south island. The reason was to bring tourists who were staying on the south over to their restaurant/bar/beach for the day. A side effect was that people who lived on the north would use it to get back and forth to go shopping, work or school. If you did that and wasn’t a native, it was expected that you would go spend money at the bar and/or restaurant (which we did).
To get a 20’ steel pole I needed I caught the Koko King ferry over to the south, went to one of the three hardware stores there and bought a pole. They then delivered it to the dock and I arranged for a private boat to come pick me and the pole up and take us back to the north. This was all still very new to me because in the states the technician will bring everything with them to install your service.
So, steel pipe in hand, I had what I call my Waiting for Godot moment. We were told that we could expect installation within a week of ordering it. After about three days I got a call from the technician saying he would be there the next day. Two days later he did show up and look everything over. He said that he would return to finish the job. Then came a maddening series of appointments and no-shows day after day. The excuses would range from that he couldn’t get a boat to he couldn’t find an assistant (turns out that although he’s the tech installing dishes for internet, he’s afraid of heights) to any number of other excuses. Every day by 2 or 3 PM I would call him or the Smart office trying to find out what was going on and when we would really see him. It got to the point where he asked me to stop calling the office as it was giving him a bad reputation with the ladies in the Belize City office. Finally after about two weeks he showed up with his assistant and installed our internet dish. Yay,! We finally were reconnected with the world and my wife could resume working with her clients from our house. (Up to then she’d been going over to a friend’s house to use her WiFi to work.)
But this is what I learned. You can have the most robust plan from the provider and the best equipment on your end, routers, etc, but because everything is coming in and going out of a single point (the main Smart dishes on the tower), the more people that jump on the web, the slower the connection. For us this was unacceptable since what that meant in practice is that my wife would be in a Zoom meeting and would get disconnected suddenly. This happened over and over to the point where she was threatening to move back to the states so she could work. We worked with Smart and the technician to try and resolve this to varying degrees of success (or non-success as the case may be).
Fast forward and after a month we moved from the north island to the south island and then eventually into an Eastern facing beach house. As I said, there are two options for internet on the south island. One is Smart which is supplied via satellite dish and the other is BTL.
When we first got here and I found out about the BTL internet service on the island I got very excited. Why? It’s because BTL provides their service through Fiber Optics! What’s so special about fiber optics? I think the most apt comparison would be the difference between getting your internet through a straw or a fire hose. Fiber optics is orders of magnitude faster and more robust than dish satellite. Having come from San Francisco and reading about fiber optics for the last few years but not be able to get it, the chance to finally have fiber optics internet was exhilarating!
But when we tried to get BTL service in our new abode, we instead ended up with Smart. Why? It was because the landlord couldn’t get their neighbor to agree to granting right of way for the BTL line. So we had Smart installed and with it the problems of my wife getting disconnected intermittently while working. But still I held onto the faint glimmering hope that we could get BTL installed.
For a while, I confess, I gave up. But then one day I was standing on the back porch overlooking the back of the Amigo Store and realized that there was a BTL pole just on the other side of that building. If we could get permission from them to run a line across their property we would have fiber optics!
Caye Caulker is small and slow and so I walked over to the store to ask for their permission. They told me the owners were the Marin family who lived upstairs. So I went to the stairs on the side of the building and said ‘Hello’ over and over again until a woman came to the window and talked to me. I explained who I was, where we lived and what we wanted to do and she said she would have to ask her dad. I followed up several days later and she said her dad was fine with it.
It turns out that we didn’t need to attach the line to their house because there is a pole on the community basketball court on the side, but the line did cross their property. I had to have their large Tamarind tree between the pole and our house trimmed and exactly five days after starting this we had BTL fiber optics installed. Exactly to the day when the technician said it would be!
After the technician installed the router and input our username and password, I tested it out on my phone. I pulled up a random YouTube video and pressed play. Normally there is a few second lag (at least) before the video starts playing. So I was shocked when it started playing almost immediately.
So was it worth it? The main reason we got it was so my wife could work. The problem with the Smart internet was that she kept getting bumped off of her Zoom calls in the middle of a meeting. Now we have her hardwired via Ethernet cable to the router and she hasn’t been bumped off once yet. Also the BTL speed is the same as our current Smart service but, where as we are currently on the best Smart plan, this is the lowest BTL plan. So yes, I’m very happy with it.
