No Wireless Internet From Pachuca

Early yesterday afternoon my Skype connection was broken abruptly during a conversation with a friend in Port Townsend. For the rest of the night I tried in vain to get access to the internet. My Telcel service reported that I was connected, but I got no service.

This morning I asked for advice from the 7 AM VHF radio net. It looks like I've blown my 1 gigabyte quota for the month. Because of an earlier event where I was cut off after doing a lot of uploading followed by normal service the next day I had assumed that I was on a daily quota. It looks like I was wrong - it is a monthly quota. This explains why I was able to recently upload those two videos without getting cut off. (Yep, from now on I'll do my heavy uploading from the cantina over a beer.)

I can't cop all of the blame for the confusion. The Telcel service reports the number of bytes in and out for each connection, line by line. But it neither aggregates the numbers nor reports on how many bytes remain in the quota. I was unable to cut 'n paste the numbers to load into a spreadsheet and I am reluctant to keep a running total of 4 or 5 connections a day which would add up to over 150 lines per month.

The timing could not have been worse. I asked over the VHF net if Telcel was open today (Saturday). "Affirmative" I heard a woman say. So I walked to a nearby Telcel outlet and found it closed then did the 3 km walk to the main Telcel office and found it closed. And Monday is the Cinco de Mayo holiday (http://www.nacnet.org/assunta/spa5may.htm) and I'm not sure if Telcel will be open (though I think that it will).