Gerhard Potgieter

Neotel has not officialy launched their NeoFlex service with a press release, but arcording to sources you can simply dial 0860636832 and they will give you the prices for the packages.

For all of you that was waiting for a uncapped option I’m sorry to say that there currently isn’t one, but hopefully by July they might bring out an uncapped package.

The following packages is available:

1. 10Gig Package @ R599pm
2. 15Gig Package @ R799pm

Ontop of that you must either sign a 24month contract and then add R100 to your monthly premium for the ethernet device or you can buy the device for a once-off cost of R2000.

The packages is data only packages and once customers reach their data cap, Neotel’s out of bundle rates are charged at a nominal fee of 8 cents per Megabyte.

Im actualy a bit disapointed at the prices, as I expected larger caps or even a uncapped option. If you opt for the 10gb package you pay just under the R60 per Gig and on the 15gb package you pay about R54 per Gig, these prices realy dont give much competition but it still beat if you take in account that you have to pay line rental on normal ADSL lines.

[EDIT]

More details available on the Neotel Website

Neotel is set to launch its new NeoFlex data only broadband offering next week.

Many consumers have been waiting for this day for a while now, and looks like it has finally arived. This will be the first data-only offering from Neotel with the company’s first ethernet based router.

MyBroadband had the privilage to do eary testing of the service and reported that it did well rivaling Telkom’s ADSL service.

The product aimed at the residential market has theoretical downlink speeds of up to 3.1 Mbps and uplink speeds in excess of 1 Mbps, this is all dependant where in the coverage area you lie and how good your signal is.

Neotel will make the product specifications and pricing available on their website next week with a press release. For more info keep an eye on the Neotel website.

I once again got some info regarding the Neotel ethernet device from my reliable source.

Last time I posted about Neotel busy testing a ethernet device, and today I am proud to say that the device they are testing is the Axxesstel D800a. This info could be wrong, but as I said before I got it from a reliable source.

The device has speed capabilities of up to 2.4Mbps, has diversity antennas (meaning 2) for better coverage resulting in better speeds, has battery backup, plug and play ethernet ports, a web gui for configuring the device, aswell as 1x CDMA2000 voice and 1 analog fax port.

More info can be found here

Neotel could be offering its subscriber an ethernet device sooner than we think.

Sources told me that neotel received a bunch of ethernet devices for testing perpose this week. So who knows if testing goes well we may just maybe see a ethernet device in a few months time, who knows maybe even in a month or 2.

Neotel is just another way of showing companies how it should be done, they listhen to what their customers want, and the give it to them. Now they must just start selling wimax to home customers and start expanding their coverage more agresively.

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.