Gerhard Potgieter

Have you ever tried waching a video on YouTube and gotten the message “We’re sorry, this video is no longer available”?

If you are a South African and using Telkom then your answer probably is yes.

The problem arrise from transparent proxies SAIX pushes all traffic through. This results in your connection to the site having a different IP each time, and then this can be seen as a hacking attempt of some sort.

Some forums out there operate on the same principal, say you are logged in and your IP changes you are then automatically logged out.

Good news is there is a work arround. You can use a fixed proxy, that will result in you having the same IP address each time you load a page.

To make use of this simply edit your browser proxy setting and add cache.saix.net:8080 as the server and port.

Now you should be able to browse sites uninterupted.

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.

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.