How did it impact your productivity? Was there enough bandwidth to videochat with your coworkers, and if not do you feel like that had any downsides?

Actually it was 2 years from Alaska to Argentina and then 3 years around Africa.

Internet connectivity is MUCH better than you're thinking. 3G and 4G in every town big enough to have a gas station.

The wired internet was so fast in Nairobi and Cape Town I legitimately thought something was wrong. After living in the US, Canada and Australia I've never used internet even half that fast, it was mind bending.

I wonder if that might be because wired is still somewhat of a luxury compared to most that the ISP's aren't held back by the service they offer since there are so few utilizing the bandwidth.

I take it you've never been to Cape Town?

It's much, MUCH more developed than you're thinking. Hundreds of thousands of people in a very beautiful and modern city.

When I went to Cape Town the internet was awful. Super slow (at least for US/EU sites) and with very restrictive data caps (IIRC, 10GB per month). That was circa 2008 so perhaps things are better now

10GB a month? Jeez what were you doing? Streaming videos all day!?

Is that considered a lot, especially for home internet? I was busting 3-5x that a couple years ago on mobile data alone.

I was mostly joking but 10GB even in 2008 still isn't a lot. 300gb hard drives were pretty common. Although I bet you could've got a lot more out of that 10GB than you can now what with the absurd amount of ads and excessive bloat on websites nowadays.

2008 was 12 years ago, not a couple.

A lot has changed in 12 years