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.

With the increased popularity of wireless technology today more and more homes and businesses are starting to use this technology.

What most of these users don’t know is that if you don’t secure your wireless network anybody within range of the network can gain access to it if you don’t have security measures in place.

A while back Telkom started giving away free wireless ADSL routers to all new self install users signing up. This move contributed to a even larger percentage of unsecured wireless networks out there, and these networks are unsecured without the users even knowing it.

If you are into wifi like I am, every now and then you would do a scan just to see how many networks is in your area. With these scans almost every time I picked up at least 2 unsecured wireless home networks. Just to mention I can then easily connect to these networks and then use the ADSL, some cases I could even log in to the wireless router with the default username and password. In a country like South Africa where bandwidth is so expensive there are allot of people out there that exploit these unsecured wireless networks and use up all the bandwidth there is, leaving the owner flabbergasted to hear from his ISP that he used up all his bandwidth.

So I thought it would be a good thing just to list a few things you can do to ensure that your wireless network is protected from unauthorized use.

1. First thing you do when you receive your wireless router is to always change the default username and/or password.
2. Enable some form of security, like WEP, WPA, WPA2, or MAC authentication. This will ask new users to the network for a passkey to be able to connect to the network, or the user’s mac must be enabled on the router.
3. Use static IP addressing rather than a DHCP server. This will make it harder for an intruder to guess your IP range and Gateway IP for internet use.
4. If you are a large business running advanced wireless network use RADIUS to authenticate your users.
5. And last if you can check your router logs as often as possible to see attempts of unauthorized access.

If your are still not sure how to secure your network feel free to leave comments and I’ll try and direct you into the right direction to help you secure your wireless network.

Remember a wireless network is never safe from unauthorized access but you can always make it harder for a person to be able to access it. Always remember a form of security is better than none at all.

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.