The Real Wi-Fight: Romania’s Race to Connect Every Corner of the Country
Romania’s journey to widespread internet access began in the early 1990s, after the fall of communism. The country’s first connection to the Internet was established in 1993 ici.ro, relatively late compared to Western Europe, but this late start allowed Romania to leapfrog older technologies. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, tech-savvy Romanians in urban apartment blocks created their own neighborhood local area networks by stringing Ethernet cables between buildings thecgo.org. These informal grassroots networks – often set up to share files, games, and pirated media – flourished due to lax regulation, resulting in visible nests of overhead wires in cities thecgo.org thecgo.org. When commercial internet service took off toward the late 1990s, Romania’s weak telephone infrastructure meant DSL never became widespread. Instead, those apartment LANs evolved into dozens of small ISPs that jumped directly to fiber-optic technology, bypassing the slower DSL era thecgo.org. This head start in deploying fiber in urban areas led to remarkably fast internet speeds. By the early 2010s, Romania had a reputation for blazing broadband: as of 2020 it ranked third in the world for fastest fixed internet, behind only Singapore and Hong Kong thecgo.org. The capital Bucharest became a “digital fantasy” for travelers, brimming
