From the games journalist’s inbox: What I learned about Eritrea today thanks to a spam email

If you run a website with a certain reach, you will get emails every day. Many of them useful and enjoyable, in our case, when they revolve around cool new games. A lot of the emails are less moving, but still perfectly legitimate, there’s a lot of spam, and sometimes, very rarely, we brighten up the day with a really dumb email.

This email, which I just don’t want to hide from you here, belongs in the category of link fisherman emails. This is more or less questionably researched top-something content that you should use right away, but if you do, then please with a link to your own website to be marketed. These are often enough casinos or questionable financial service providers. Don’t worry, I’m not linking to any of it here or anywhere else.

These “news” text modules are usually harmless. Which game soundtracks run the most on Spotify, which influencers earn how much, which game series have had the most sequels. Most of this information is poorly researched or not researched at all and is therefore often incorrect, but not particularly reprehensible in terms of the subject. Sometimes open the mail briefly, mostly not, never do anything with it, never just publish it.

But today I got an email of this kind, which is just so surreal that I don’t want to withhold it from you. The theme is “These countries in the world have the cheapest fixed-line Internet”. Ok very specific but why not. If you research it, convert it to the performance of the providers, income in the country and so on, it is a very complex matter, but not uninteresting. I immediately believe that Germany would not fare well, but seeing what you can get in other countries for how much, of course, why not.

Instead I read that the country with the cheapest internet access is Ukraine. For the equivalent of 6.50 dollars I supposedly get internet. It is unclear which Internet and whether the free access to Star-Link is included if I want to transmit the battle data from my command post. Probably not, because it’s about the price for fixed-line network access, even if the linked statistics don’t show this in any way. But the statement alone, without any mention of the situation in the country related to this number, is, well, daring? Stupid? At best meaningless.

It continues happily without comment that fixed-line network access in Russia and Belarus is also very cheap. You see, you can’t see everything on the internet, but at least what hasn’t been censored is cheap. Yay. But not only the cheap end of the world is mentioned, no, also the most expensive landline country makes its appearance: Eritrea with 2666 dollars. Where does this number come from, which provider, is there any other infrastructure in the country? Regardless, it will be fine.

Well, if you even look at the Eritrea wiki page, you might conclude that this price is a steal. The last real infrastructure development took place under the occupiers before and shortly after the Second World War (Italy and England). The country’s main railway line is served by a steam engine and by all the indices of corruption and stability the country is, well, not doing well. For at least a stable line only 2666 dollars does not sound so bad. Especially since, if you read a little further, you will find that private internet access is practically forbidden. Also that there is only one 2G network nationwide. That private mobile phones of any kind are rare, that in the handful of Internet cafes in the capital there are always guards lurking about whether an anti-state website is being opened. Relatively many pages are probably anti-state. Yep, $2600 for private access sounds like a bargain.

After that, the e-mail is converted a little to Mbps per dollar, but this does not bring any new insights. Finally, after a little more than ten lines, the mail ends with a request to link to the website on whose behalf these great numbers were compiled. I’ll end it with this gold nugget: “Edith…, the financial analysts of…, states: Ukraine’s broadband and mobile infrastructure is excellent and allows users to move large amounts of data at a fraction of the average cost. This means, that Ukrainians enjoy fast, reliable Internet that costs far less than it would in other countries. With more and more daily Internet users, the demand for affordable Internet access will continue to grow.” Now that’s probably not completely wrong, even if I would like to question the reliability when my neighboring country uses a lot of energy and rockets to paralyze my communication infrastructure.

That was an email that was different. But then not useless. In the end, I was able to take away some interesting facts about a country – Eritrea – that I don’t think about as much as the rest of the world does.

And now back to games. And it’s way too warm. But probably not as warm as in Eritrea and I have cheap internet where I can open whatever pages I like. Although not as cheap as in an active war zone. Well, I guess you can’t have everything.