Gerhard Potgieter

Today I discovered a new site dedicated to listing broaband packages. Its brand new as ISP’s are still adding their packages on the site as I am writing this entry. The site www.broadbanddeals.co.za looks like it is a MyBroadband.co.za site. The goal of the site is to list all types of broadband packages available by ISPs for the 6 types of broadband services offered in South Africa. The site has a nice control panel for ISP to log into and add packages and details about them in a convenient way. So if you are a ISP feel free to register on the site for free and help make the site a success.

Last night Neotel showed their firt TV advert. This means the game is on in the local telecoms market and telkom will be feeling the competition soon.

The add is embeded.

For those of you that read my previous post about rumors that Telkom is trialing a 8Mbps ADSL service, well the good news is that it is true.

Telkom is trialing a 8Mbps ADSL service but told press that it will take so time before it is commercially made available to the public.

The company said that upping their current 4Mbps ADSL service to to 8Mbps is not a simple process as it must be accompanied by backhaul upgrades to the network to support the higher speeds.

Telkom said that they are also trailing ADSL2+, mainly aimed at supporting IPTV plans. ADSL2+ can support speeds up to 24Mbps if users are close enough to the exchange.

Things is looking quite promising for South African telecoms with these kind of speeds in the future, lets just hope Telkom will reduce the price of their SAT3 access once they start trialing, thats if this is gonna happing this year still. Otherwise we must put our hopes on the new cable systems to bring cheap high speed internet to South Africa.

South African telecoms is really starting to take off. Yesterday I wrote about OpenWeb’s VPN ADSL that offered you 30gb international traffic for and odd R700 and something.

Today I found another ISP thats more suited to the needs of the lower end user. SAOL a subsidiary ISP of Cybersmart now offers users a bundled line and high cap account.

The package includes 15GB of unshaped data, a 384K ADSL line, a static IP, aswell as router rental all for only R499. After you reached your cap data is charged at R59 per GB which is still cheap.

Rumour also has it that Cybersmart will soon be offering a solution called Nightrider where only 1/5th of you data usage count toward your cap during 1am and 7am. So if you use 15 gigabytes during the month during these times, only 3 gigabytes will count towards your cap.

Things are really starting to take shape in the South African telecoms space, looks like this could be the work of Neotel selling SAT3 bandwidth to the ISP’s. I would just like to see the big ISP’s like WebAfrica and IS start offering similar products.

OpenWeb recently launched a 30 GB VPN ADSL service.

The service is a 30GB - 512k VPN ADSL account selling for R749 which equates to R24.97 per GB.

The service works through a 30GB local account, included in the price, connected to the OpenWeb VPN server.

This new revolutionary product allows you 100% unshaped bandwidth, P2P and torrent downloads, and pretty much anything you can think of on the net, running over OpenWeb’s fibre Based network for the best latencies!

OpenWeb gets my vote for this one, a great idea in providing South Africans with cheap bandwidth. This is no doubt a step in the right direction to provide South Africans with low cost high cap bandwidth. Great work OpenWeb, now the others must just start to follow.

With the routerboard 433 already shipping to suppliers, Mikrotik will soon make available the bad brother of the 433. The RB433AH is a more powerfull version of the standard RB433. The 128MB DDR will be capable
of supporting new RouterOS features coming. The microSD slot supports an additional memory card that can be used for a Dude database and other features to be announced in during Spring ‘08.

The 680MHz Atheros MIPs 24K CPU, that can be overclocked to 800MHz, with a 64KB/32KB instruction/data cache is probably the fastest CPU used in low cost wireless access points.

The three Ethernets and mpci slots give you ample data interfaces to put the big CPU power to work.

The RB433 and RB433AH replace the RB133 and RB333 positions of the mikrotik product line.

CPU Atheros AR7130 680MHz network processor (Tested at 800MHz)
Memory 128MB DDR SDRAM onboard memory
Boot loader RouterBOOT
Data storage 64MB onboard NAND memory chip and microSD
Ethernet Three 10/100 Mbit/s Ethernet ports with Auto-MDI/X
miniPCI Three MiniPCI Type IIIA/IIIB slots
Extras Reset switch, Beeper
Serial port One DB9 RS232C asynchronous serial port
LEDs Power, NAND activity, 5 user LEDs
Power options Power over Ethernet: 10..28V DC (except power over datalines). Power jack: 10..28V DC. Voltage monitor.
Dimensions 10.5 cm x 15 cm, 137 grams
Power consumption ~3W without extension cards, maximum – 25 W, 16W output to cards
Operating System MikroTik RouterOS v3, Level5 license

The expected shipping date of these units are still to be made public, but I’m sure WUGs arround South Africa will scoop up these units as soon as they arrive.

Rumor has it that Telkom will be launching a 8mbps ADSL trial anytime soon. According to several users from the MyBroadband forum, Telkom techies told them that Telkom will soon be launching a 8mbps ADSL trial.

This comes to no surprise as cellphone companies MTN and Vodacom has launched their 7.2mbps HSDPA services as a trial a month or 2 back.

According to the techies the 8mbps will be first run as a trial to current 4mbps users. My question is just with all this speed when will we have uncapped accounts or high cap account to accommodate all that speed for a fraction of the cost it currently goes for.

So lets just have a look at what the requirements are to have a 8mbps line running at its full speeds. Currently there are various 4mbps users that can’t even achieve their full line speeds, this is cause of the fact that they live far from a exchange. ADSL works at a maximum distance of about 5km from the exchange for normal low end speed. According to the graph below to achieve a speed of 8mbps you’ll need to live about maximum 1.8km from the exchange and that is the worst case to sync at 8mbps. Just take in consideration that there are other factors that can also influence sync rates to the exchanges such as.

• the length of copper wire from your premises to the exchange - this is always higher than the distance ‘as the crow flies’.
• the number and type of other digital services being used by other customers over copper pairs within the same cable sheath.
• the configuration and line quality of the copper wire pair between the exchange and your premises.
• electrical interference from outside sources (such as electric motors).
• the configuration of the copper wiring within your premises (ie use a central splitter for optimal performance).
• the software configuration and application on your computer (in particular how it uses the uplink back to the exchange).
• your ADSL hardware.
• the capacity of, load on, and access data rate of the destination host computer which you are accessing.

All and all I wont say no to a 8mbps line, and sure the majority of users out there won’t either. Maybe this is just what is needed to bring down the cost of faster ADSL speeds and maybe introduce cheap uncapped or high cap accounts. You can follow the MyBroadband thread here.

Vodacom in collaboration with Vodafone is bringing the Apple iPhone to South Africa. Vodafone signed a contract with Apple to sell the iPhone in ten markets including Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey. The iphone is expected later this year — thats all thats made public for now.

Mikrotik announced the release of the RB433 early this week. The RB433 is a high performance AP (Access Point) with a 300mhz Atheros CPU. With the announcement of the RB433 came the EOL (End of line) announcement of the RB333 a performance AP that was based on the PowerPC CPU.

The RB433 is the replacement for the RB333, which is weird cause the RB333 hasn’t been in production for that long. Mikrotik probably used the RB333 to test the PowerPC CPU in their devices. We at CTWUG have a RB333 on one of our highsites and it perform very well.

Back to the RB433, it is kinda a exact replica of the RB333 with exception to its hardware specs and price. The RB344 boasts a Atheros AR7130 300MHz CPU, 64MB Memmory, 3 x 10/100 Ethernet ports with one POE (Power over ethernet) enabled, 3 miniPCI slots for wireless radios, 12~28V DC power jack aswell as POE, and the great RouterOS level4. One thing that it doesn’t support is remote voltage monitoring, something that is expected in a later hardware release.

I spoke to william at Scoop Distribution earlier today and they expect stock arrival by the end of May. The best thing about the RB433 is the price, it will be sold for just under R800 here in SA as apposed to the RB333 that is currently going for R1300 exlc vat. Scoop also told me that they will be selling the RB333 for R1150 as they are trying to clear our the RB333 in expectation of the new RB433.

All and all I’m looking forward to this new High Performance AP from Mikrotik and know they won’t dissapoint as always. Im sure CTWUG will be stoking up on on the RB433 for new highsites and even relay nodes as soon as these babies goes on sale.

So this is the NanoStation2, it gets described as “The Ultimate CPE for the Global WISP Community” but lets see what makes its manufacturers think that this device is so leet. Firstly this is the NanoStation2, where the hell was the NanoStation1? Me being part of CTWUG I have all my doubt in this little device as all devices I know that really packs a punch in the wireless industry is Mikrotik Routerboards. So lets have a look at the NanoStation2 specs as given by the Ubiquiti website.

• Processor Specs: Atheros AR2316 SOC, MIPS 4KC, 180MHz
• Memory Information: 16MB SDRAM, 4MB Flash
• Networking Interface: 1 X 10/100 BASE-TX (Cat. 5, RJ-45) Ethernet Interface
• Wireless Approvals: FCC Part 15.247, IC RS210
• RoHS Compliance: Yes
• TX Power: 26dBm, +/-2dB
• RX Sensitivity: -97dBm +/-2dB
• Antenna: Integrated 10dBi Dual Pol + External SMA
• Outdoor Range: over 15km
• TCP/IP Throughput: 25Mbps+
• Max Power Consumption: 5 Watts
• Power Supply: 12V, 1A (12 Watts). Supply and injector included
• Power Method: Passive Power over Ethernet (pairs 4,5+; 7,8 return)
• Operating Temperature: -20C to +70C (System PCB optimized for hi-temp)
• Operating Humidity: 5 to 95% Condensing
• Shock and Vibration: ETSI300-019-1.4
• Weight: 0.4 kg

Out of personal experience with wifi networking I dont think this devices comes close to the Mikrotik Routerboard 133c, and just to mention the 133c is not being produced anymore as its being replaced with the RB411 that packs a powerful 300Mhz Atheros Networking processor. And the lack of a high gain antenna puts me off, as 10dbi is not worth it for a CPE. The throughput listed there is hard for me to believe, maybe in a lab at a distance of 5m but still then i have my doubts as a 175Mhz Atheros cpu maxes out at about 14mbps. Sure it has a kinda powerful radio, but that anway illegal in South Africa. If I must take a guess the NanoStation would retail at about R700 - R900 here in South Africa and for that price I would rather buy a custom Routerboard CPE from scoop. All in all the NanoStation looks good from the outside but with the multitude of CPE enclosures you get nowadays there is better designs out there.

Just to sum it up, I dont forsee this device competing with any Mikrotik produk in the near future as Mikrotik has a good OS on their devices and has allot of power behind their devices that overtakes the NanoStation by far.