SA pigeon 'faster than broadband'

Colin Alston karnaugh at karnaugh.za.net
Tue Sep 22 08:24:02 UTC 2009


On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 8:54 PM, Scott Weeks <surfer at mauigateway.com> wrote:

>
> It would be nice to know what those recommendations were...
>
>
Excuse the delayed reply from a SA person :)

I'm guessing the recommendations were not to use an asymmetrical service for
trying to upload large amounts of data.

Ironically the company in question has access to MetroFibre (
http://www.durban.gov.za/durban/services/images-and-documentation/metroconnect.pdf),
but as with most Durban businesses and callcenter mentality in general -
they want carrier class upstream for home user money... There is a point to
be made that in SA "home user money" can get you a GE port at LoNAP. Still
many people don't understand the whole "you get what you pay for" thing, and
they expect blazingly fast internet on whatever they buy even if they have
100 users sharing it and all streaming Youtube concurrently.

They could of course also use a symmetrical wimax or wifi solution (we have
a couple of those now, I use one at my home office). And there are lots of
people doing bonded ADSL systems for people who want to scale downstream
capacity on the cheap.

Not really a monopoly anymore, but there is still a big lack of clue all
around (especially with Neotel who currently provision Seacom). It took for
example 2 weeks to convince my WiMAX ISP that ATPC was causing my uplink
encoding to downgrade to BPSK because the noise floor was too unstable, or
the tower was misconfiguration, or something - eventually I had to break
into the CPE and fix it myself...

So sadly Telkom ADSL still represents the best cost and reliability point
for many peoples use.

This particular story though was just a cheap publicity stunt that was
thwarted by the entire industry as specious.



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