Gerhard Potgieter

In a country like South Africa where Telkom dominate the local telecoms market, local communication is extrodinary expensive. That was untill a group of local citizens had enough and started their own wireless based network called a WUG (Wireless User Group).

The first WUG started out in Johannesburg, and then spark interest in other provinces where users started their own WUGS aswell. Recently JAWUG (Johannesburg Area Wireless User Group), PTAWUG (Pretoria Wireless User Group) and PWP (Pretoria Wireless Project) finally got to a point where they could link up their networks and bring their total connected nodes to just over 200 and covering +-140km of area.

If you are interested in finding out more about a WUG in your area please visit wug.za.net for a complete list of wugs in South Africa.

For a complete article about the networks check out the MyBroadband article.

Can you say 30ms pings? CTWUG certainly can now. Yesterday some of the guys braved the cold rain and marble sized hail and went out to install the latest addition the the CTWUG high site family namely Jupiter.

Jupiter is situated on top op Tygerberg Hill and cuts the hops in more that half to go from one side of the network to the other side. It boast backbone links to Saturn and Neptune, also another new site, aswell as a 5.8 sector and 2.4 panel towards Durbanville/Brackenfell area. What is great is the latency, its the lowest the WUG has had so far and this is a great plus point for all the gaming enthusiasts.

Just want to give a great thanks to the guys that made this possible in the weather, we as a WUG greatly appreciates it. As for all the users on the WUG, hope you have your KY ready!

During this weekend some of the guys from CTWUG went out to do some maintenance on our Mars high site. During this time they also thought it would be a good opertunity to sort the backbone link to LoemWug.

LoemWug is a Wireless User Group operating in the Southern Suburbs of Cape Town, they have about 40 users according to their admins. CTWUG en LoemWug have been negotiating now for a long time to link up and the day has finally arrived.

CTWUG and LoemWug are now officially linked via the Mars high site, so it safe to say the the combined user total of both WUGS are now almost 100 users. All that has to be done now is sort the routing as the 2 WUGS run on different ip ranges, but I’m sure this will be sorted anytime soon.

And some other news, CTWUG will be putting up its Tygerberg Hill high site tomorrow. After the completion of this site we will have our own fully owned backbone reaching from one point of the network to the other end. The site will provide a one hop link to the other side of the hill which should drop latency quite a bit, it will also have 1 5.8 sector covering Durbanville Brackenfell side of the hill aswell as a 2.4 panel cover the same area. The site will be called Jupiter and will link to Saturn and Pluto via Rellik for now.

Good luck to the team going up tomorrow, hope everything goes smooth and as planned. We are really starting to build a kick ass network now.