Internet in a box

I finally did it. I’m off that dumb, ferging, lame-arse, son of a h Telkom ADSL. Hell on earth does not even begin to describe the past month for me. Frustration is when there is work to be done, the dsl light on the modem is off and the phone is picking KBC English service. Arghhhhhhhhhhh! I had one of two options: follow up with the Telkom punks for two months to get the line fixed OR call up my other two alternatives and declare my unconditional surrender.

Popote Wireless and Africa Online were the contenders and quite frankly all I really cared about was that my ISP would just at least pretend(yes, pretend) that they gave a shit about my problems, should any occur in the first place. To cut a long story short, I went for Infinet. The equipment costs for both were more or less the same (~16K) so the major difference was the rental: 3K for popote and 9K for infinet(also Telkom hiked their rates).

Two things put me off popote. First, IMO, the popote terminal is simply put, a phone and looking at the thing reminds me of that refurbished hardware that has outlived its usefulness in the ‘developed’ world and is dumped here in the ‘third’ world(Come to think of it now, there is a lot of stuff that’s dumped on us here…). The thing is a 15K phone. I have a cellphone, I don’t need another phone. What if I need two other extensions, do I need to buy two other phones? Secondly, I wasn’t too sure about the speeds. When you’re told “Upto speeds of 115K”, hey what will I get on average, “well you see that depends on how strong the signal is and you may have to get an external antenna” blah blah blah. The external antenna is like another 6g’s. To be fair, I do not know anyone using popote nor do they have a demo setup anywhere so I cannot say for sure how well the thing works. I do know people using Flashcom(their site has been under construction for months). Suprisingly, Flashcom say you get up to 90K speed and popote quote 115K (I thot both companies use the same technology, what’s up?). The people on Flashcom get 50Kb/s on average, the connection drops every 30 minutes and you can only do one thing at a time: make a call or browse the net(so Telkom does have a selling point here). Flashcom, however, don’t have an unlimited option. This setup is ok if all you do is check your mail and general browsing, period. The second thing that put me off popote is that I need an always on connection for some of the things I will be doing in the coming months. If it were not for these two things, I surely would have jumped onto the popote bandwagon.

Internet in a box. That was my first impression of the desktop modem. I made the payment, got a box, carried it with me, unpacked the contents, plugged it in and voila, contact. They call it plug n play Internet. The modem looks like something out of a sci-fi movie. It has a curves and 7 luminous leds(power, signal and 5 signal strength lights).

I’ve got good signal strength, 100% and the browsing speeds are ok. I suspect they rate limit each connection to 4KB/s(Eg. each image on a web page comes down at 4KB/s) because when I download using the browser’s download manager that’s exactly what I get but using any other accelerator(or tuning on pipelining in firefox), I get 12-14KB/s(that’s expected for 128K). So the band is there but the rate limiting messes up some other things I’m doing. I’ll call them up first thing tomorrow to see if they can get me out of this.The connection holds. As of writing, I’ve been up 7hrs short of two days and I believe it would have been longer had it not been for a power glitch.

To share the connection in the house, I using my ADSL modem/router. Lucky for me the thing has a PPPoE client so I will not have to fork out another 8g’s to get a router.

Skype works ok. The sound isn’t choppy and the latency is good so I can carry out a decent conversation on the thing. I haven’t had a chance to try the video but I’ll post an update as soon as I do.

I guess that is about as much as I can say about it now. I mean what else is there to care about. The band is there, the connection holds, and all my applications work. All there is now is to hope the status quo remains.

Something I’ve come to realize when it come to connectivity options, what works for one person may or may not work for another. Take the ADSL for instance, the most frustrating thing is that I know people who have no problems at all with their link meanwhile I’m pulling hairs over mine. These people live less than 2km from their exchange and the line to their house is clean i.e. very little static/interference even when it rains. If you have such a line, telkom may be your answer if you can live without support.

Bai Bai Telkom.