OpenWeb ADSL @ R49/GB

OpenWeb has been one of SA's more prominent providers of affordable uncapped ADSL services, and have now added equally affordable per-GB accounts to their lineup.

You can now get 1GB at R49 with packages up to 10GB at R490, and accounts feature instant activation if you pay using your credit card. These semi-unshaped ADSL accounts also allow 4 concurrent sessions, and P2P is enabled for rabid downloaders who don't use news servers or file sharing sites.

At R49/GB though the OpenWeb per-gig packages are some of the cheapest available in SA's overpriced bandwidth market (thanks Telkom!), and in case you were wondering, the accounts work equally well on 384k, 512k, and 4Mbps ADSL connections as they don't limit your line speed.

If you'd like to cast your eyes across the packages, head on over to OpenWeb.co.za.

Water bursts into iBurst offices

It looks like iBurst has lived up to its name. In the early hours of yesterday morning a complimentary torrent of water on the floor above their Joburg office came bursting in to say hi, sending the daily water needs of a small town into the offices below. The offices are, for all intents and purposes, flooded. If you need to go to the iBurst offices in the next couple of days, please take along a jetski, or at the very least a flotation device. A mop wouldn't hurt either, just hint for some free bandwidth.

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Telkom upgrading ADSL users for free, mahala, bogerol and nothing extra

Telkom's ADSL users will be receiving a belated Christmas present this year. Telkom will be upgrading current 4Mbps ADSL subscribers to a minimum of 8Mbps by March/April. If your line quality is good enough and your exchange supports it, you could be upgrade to 12Mbps.

Upstream speeds will be in the region of 10% of the download speed, so 8Mbps ADSL will have around 800Kbps upload and 12Mbps likely around 1.2Mbps.

If your line doesn't quite cut it connecting at 8Mbps, the DSLAM (Digital Subscriber Line Access Module - the device to which the ADSL portion of your phone line is connected to at your telephone exchange) will attempty to sync at 1Mbps increments above 4Mbps. This means that if your line can keep a stable 5Mbps maximum sync, then that will be your line speed, but if it can sync at 6 or 7Mbps then even better.

The only bad news is that only areas with suitable exchanges will be upgraded, so unfortunately we won't all be getting the improved speeds all at once.

No word yet about 384K and 512K subscribers, but we'd imagine that 384K would become 1Mbps and 512K could become 2Mbps? Hopefully Telkom doesn't upgrade 384K to 512K and 512K to 4Mbps, that would just be a touch silly.

Oh, like the previous speed upgrades, the new ADSL speed upgrades will be free of charge.

Akamai World Broadband Speed Report by Country, USA 18th

Delivery network Akamai, using data from the third quarter of 2009, has announced that the average US broadband speed declined by 2.4 percent compared to the same period in 2008. Delaware currently has the highest broadband speed at 7.2 Mbps.

The US in general remains far behind countries like South Korea, where the average broadband speed is almost 15Mbps. The US is currently in 18th place out of 203 nations tested - far behind most of Europe and Asia, with an average broadband speed of only 3.9 Mbps.

Akamai said global connection speeds overall increased to 1.7 Mbps, a 13 percent improvement from a year ago. They also report that the US was home to 119.2 million of the world's 444.1 million unique IP addresses. China was second with 49.11 million.

Akamai bases its statistics on data gathered from its network of 56,000 servers spread around the world, part of its optimised media delivery system. This gives Akamai an extremely large data set to mine for information like the number of unique IP addresses accessing its services and their connection speeds. Sifting through this data and linking IP addresses to specific locations allows for detailed analysis.

Recent studies show that US customers also pay a lot more for what they get. For our average of 3.9Mbps, we pay about $40 per month. In France, by comparison, many users have access to a $45 monthly plan that includes 20-30Mbps connections, VoIP service, and HDTV with a DVR included. Such plans in the US regularly exceed $100, and speeds rarely reach those levels.

As the FCC is set to announce the first official national broadband policy in March, the Akamai study underscores the need for that policy to encourage expansion of high-speed networking infrastructure as well as drive the required competition to enable more affordable broadband connections.

MTN Prepaid now officially cheaper to call and SMS from than an MTN Contract

9 December 2009

If you use MTN for your yapping  & texting you may want to rethink your MTN Contract - MTN OneRate prepaid is cheaper than 5 of their current contract packages, not only with calls, but SMSs too. The new OneRate prepaid offering from MTN sports calls from 3.1c/second (R1.86/minute), and SMSs have been reduced to 50c all day, which is the is apparently the cheapest peak SMS rate in the land. And not only that, they're kind enough to give away 1 free 50c SMS every day. Every. Single. Day. Isn't that just spiffy of them?

Ja well no fine!

29 October 2009

Ol' Telkom is facing what pretty much anyone alive would call a stiff fine. The Competition Commission, in their wisdom, are looking to fine our favourite landline provider to the tune of up to R4 billion. That's R4,000 million -- a great deal of money.

Now, call us stupid, but this is OUR money that the Competition Commission wants. It's OUR money that we pay to Telkom for their overpriced services every month, so why should the money WE paid be taken away - again?

Hellkom thus proposes that Telkom doesn't get fined. What we propose is this: If Telkom's fine is, for argument's sake, R3.8 billion. Instead of taking our money, have Telkom do something like, say, give all their customers free phone line rental, ADSL line rental and ISDN line rental up to the value of the fine. Or credit each Telkom customer's account with the value of the fine divided by the amount of active customers.

There are many different ways one can go about this, but a fine isn't necessary.It's common sense, fining Telkom is bad for them, and bad for us! Telkom would have to recouperate that massive amount of money -- and they will do that by keeping their prices at current levels instead of lowering them.

Have Telkom give back to us rather than taking our money that we have already given to Telkom away again!

RICA cellphone registration act - killer or cure?

28 September 2009

Today in the Hellkom Inbox, the IOL newsletter plopped in as per usual, with the usual types of news articles, but one stood out more than others. The title of the article was "'The worst day of our lives'", and the first joyful paragraph says "They killed my sister for a cellphone, and also nearly killed my brother-in-law. It was the worst day of our lives."

Now call us pessimists, but RICA - the act requiring every man and his dog to register anything resembling a SIM card - is potentially more dangerous than it seems. Sure, supporters say it will reduce crime. We agree, but to an extent. Thing is, criminals will always find a way to avoid finding a job and actually doing work, and will do what they can to get what they want, as we see in the news every day.

Enter RICA. Now criminals can't just swing by a PEP store and pick up an anonymous SIM for a couple of bucks. Now they have to provide ID, proof of residence etc. - show us a criminal who is prepared to hand over their details to get a SIM card to commit their crime with? Thought so. Just like they don't register guns, where law-abiders do.

Nah, they'd rather bludgeon some innocent unknown person who DOES have a cellphone, and use that to do their thing. And if they do in fact take your phone and commit a crime and you weren't quick enough to report your phone stolen at the cop shop, you could be held liable for it because it was your number.

RICA could end up having zero effect on crime after all, and could possibly only end up increasing it.

Call us pessimists, or call us realists, but just keep your phone out of sight, it could save your life in a country where people are killed for R5 or a pair of work out tekkies.