hitting the wire*

Oops! ITWeb / Do Broadband - you have to love the irony here!

Spotted by some eagle eyes trawling ITWeb today: This.

OK, so they've fixed the faux pas, but that has to be the most ironic juxtapostion of content I've seen in a while.

Telkom DSL in less than 2 weeks with free modem, free install for under R350/month, all in.

The following was passed on to me by Sarah Rice.  Lawrence Cawood has graciously  agreed to allow me to publish it here.  If you're looking for a way to get a basic DSL service at a reasonable price with very low (i.e. none whatsoever) setup costs, read on...

"
Lawrence’s Guide to Ordering Home DSL

Step 1: Acquiring a Phone Line

If you already have a phone line, skip to step 2.
In order to make use of the DSL service, you need a permanent telephone line (not prepaid).

Loophole #1: The monthly line rental for a standard telephone line is R99 per month. You could go this route, however there exists a better option... it’s called Telkom Closer, which I’m sure you’ve heard of in the ads.   With Telkom Closer option 1, you pay R120 p/m, and get calls charged at a R1.40 flat rate for an hour at a time when calling local or long distance during callmore.

How does this help with my DSL you may ask? Well, on top of offering great savings for telephone calls (about one-sixth of the standard cost of a call during callmore), Telkom gives you FREE LINE INSTALLATION with this option, which would normally cost you three hundred and something rand. That’s loophole number one (also confirmed by the Telkom consultant I dealt with).   Even paying the extra R20 per month for a year doesn’t add up to the amount that you would usually have to pay once-off for your line installation.   And get this, the monthly line rental for a standard line is going up to R111 tomorrow (the Closer option 1 package is staying the same), so this is obviously the best choice as it includes your line rental, plus you get free phone line installation.   PS: There are other packages, such as Closer option 2 that gives you absolutely free local and long distance calls any time during the day for up to an hour at a time, however this is not necessary if you’re only planning to use DSL.

The process for signing up for a telephone line is as follows:
·        Phone 10219 and speak to a consultant
·        Tell them you want to get a residential phone line installed
·        Tell them you want ‘Closer option 1’
·        Give them your details etc.
·        They give you a date that the technician will come to your premises to install the line. They will tell you 1-2 weeks, but mine took 3 days.
·        Telkom phone you the day before they come to install. You can postpone it if you need to (I did 3 times).
·        Technician phones you in the morning, and then arrives sometime between 9am and 2pm. Installation takes about 30min.
·        You have a phone line

Step 2: Ordering DSL

Loophole #2: It is at this point that you can cancel your ‘Closer’ option. Yip, when you phone to order DSL you can ask the consultant to cancel your Closer option if you wish, which means that you saved the installation cost of your phone line (it already went through as zero on the account) AND you don’t have to pay more for the Closer option. Confirmed as loophole number 2. Stupid Telkom.   However, I would not advise cancelling your Closer option as it’s only R9 p/m more than the standard line rental, and the charge per call stops at the R1.40 flat rate.  

Ok, the first thing you need to decide is, do you want to go big or go home. Going big means having a big budget, and being able to splash out on that 4MB line for 413 bucks per month. Going home means going cheap, so if you’re like me and don’t download movies but instead get them from your friends, you don’t need a 4MB line and can part with R152 bucks p/m for a decent 384kbps connection.

Here are the DSL packages:
1.      384kbps = R152.00 p/m
2.      512kbps = R326.00 p/m
3.      4096kbps = R413.00 p/m

The first option is the most cost effective, as it offers decent gaming speeds, acceptable RDC connections to work over the VPN, and is perfect for browsing. I’d go with that one if you just want entry level DSL (this option was rated SA’s best value for money when it comes to broadband offerings).

Loophole #3: Ah yes, loophole number 3. The most important of all. This little beauty lets you get a FREE DSL modem which would normally cost you R1000, plus free DSL installation. Here’s how...   When ordering DSL, tell the consultant you want the self-install option. This means you will get a free 4-port wireless DSL router, AND you don’t have to pay the R437 DSL installation fee!   But wait, there’s more! Choosing the self-install option also reduces your wait from 4-6 weeks, to less than 2 weeks.   I also thought there was a catch, but there’s no catch... J I think it’s just easier and cheaper for them to offer an incentive to the customers to install DSL themselves.  

The process for signing up for Home DSL is as follows:
·        Phone 10219 and press 3 to speak to a consultant for ADSL
·        Tell them you want Home DSL
·        Tell them you already have an ISP (we’ll get to that later)
·        Tell them you DO want the “self install” option
·        Tell them you DON’T want a contract
·        Give them your details etc.
·        DON’T let them sell you any other crap, cause they always try to confuse you and sell you something extra. Refuse any other options they mention (i.e. TelkomInternet).
·        They say it will take around 23 days (their ‘max’ estimation), but it will probably be around 7 or 8 days. Amazing!
·        Your DSL will be enabled in a week or so (they don’t have to send someone to your house – with self install, this stuff happens on their side)
·        Install the DSL modem yourself (very easy, follow a tutorial – takes half an hour)
·        Done.

Step 3: Finding an ISP
There are many ISP’s offering similar services, so any of them should do. My ISP is WebAfrica (www.webafrica.co.za) who have a great service. If you take a 1GB account, you pay R70 per month. My 3GB cap is R198 p/m. You can buy extra prepaid cap as you need it, for R70 per GB.

With WebAfrica you get a nice admin system to check how much cap you’ve used etc.

Pricing
So, if you’ve taken the optimal route above, your monthly payments will be something like this:
  ADSL subscription (Telkom, DSL 384)   R 152 p/m   
  Line rental (Telkom)   R 120 p/m   
  ISP subscription (WebAfrica, 1GB cap)   R 70 p/m   
Total: R 342 p/m

Summary
So, what have we learned? Well for one, I learned that while Telkom still sucks, they are getting way better at customer service. The last 3 consultants I spoke to were brilliant. Shocking stuff I know.

Second, we learned that you can get DSL at home in under 2 weeks, with a free modem, free installation, for R 342 p/m.
"

As always, your milage may vary as the yanks say - you need to keep your wits about you and assume that at some stage Telkom may wise up and plug some of the loopholes.  In the meantime, feel free to make the most of Lawrence's condensed wisdon here!

More on "Unbundling the Local Loop" (ULL)

According to Tim (Storm's joint CEO), it was while listening to a story on bipolar mania on Cape Talk that Lindsay from Cape Talk called him to ask him if he'd be prepared to go on air with Mike Wills (no, I'm not mistaken - he really was on air - standing in for John Maytham).  Tim deftly tossed the ball to the first person he thought of... me.  So, while preparing to recount my lifelong experience with bipolar mania, I was somewhat flummoxed to have Mike Wills announce he wanted me to explain what "unbundling the local loop" was!

(ok, I jest - at least about the being flummoxed part - Tim would be quite adept at talking about mania's of any sort! ;)  More of that I am sure when his own blog goes live (oops... there goes the cat!)

Here is a copy of the interview if you're interested.

And I sincerely trust, Mr Halse, that I'm more coherent here than I was in the Business Day article!

That's me. More or less unbundled.

The cobblers kids are poorly shod - confessions of an inept home sysadmin.

For someone involved in telecoms and IT, I sometimes think I make poor use of technology.  My home network consists of a 512k DSL link to the Net, a Linksys WAG54GS all-in-one DSL router / LAN switch / DHCP server / WiFi AP / Firewall, into which my wife's PC is plugged and a Senao PCMCIA card (SL-5354CB) which I bought at an iWeek when WiFi was still young here.  My kids are blissfully unaware I could network their PC and provide them with the joys of online gaming - right now the likes of Age of Empires and Sacred fulfil their thirst for death and destruction by design, with no threat to our traffic-cap.

I bought the Linksys from Miro about a year back and have been quite happy with it.  Until last week.

All of a sardine, the damn thing stopped issuing my laptop with an IP address.  Nothing I tried seemed to work.  I resorted to my fallback, and hauled out the HSDPA card I use when I'm out of town.  One or two automated backups later (I run Attix5 every night now after learning the hard way that dead hard drives don't talk) and my traffic limit is trashed.  Time to get the link to the DSL line sorted!

I find some other guy has had similar problems, but can't find an obvious fix anywhere.

Part of the suggested fix from Miro was to uninstall the driver for the card and reinstall.  Nice idea. Only no one told me Senao have discontinued the card and no longer supply driver files (and the ruddy install disk has eloped with my favourite pen and has not been seen in years).  Not good.  Fortunately, Miro managed to dig up the correct install file, but still no joy from the DHCP server.  Grrrr!

Decided it must be the AP - either a factory settings reset will sort it out, or it needs a brain transplant and I'll have to take it in.  Now, few things raise my wife's ire like a broken Net connection when she has a deadline to hit and is embarking on an all-nighter.  The time she caused it herself during a DSL network wobble by pressing the reset button for too long and inadvertently reverted to factory settings (while I was away from home)... she was ready to throttle her inept sysadmin!  So, with my heart in my mouth, I hit reset and went through replacing all the settings.

I can't tell what a relief it was to have connectivity back to normal.

If you need driver files for a Senao PCMCIA card (SL-5354CB) - drop me a mail.  If your Linksys AP's DHCP server goes on the fritz... start all over.  If it starts this crap again soon I'll be ditching it for a Netgear.

Now, if anyone can tell me what I can do to speed up my wife's PC that has slowed to a crawl, I'll be delighted.  So far, I've tried most of the usual tricks, so bar laser surgery to the registry file... or wiping the hard-drive, I'm stumped.

that's me.  admin'd out.

IT & Telecoms trends in 2007

At the beginning of March I was asked to distil my thoughts on what trends are likely to emerge during 2007/2008 in the local Information & Communications Technology market. I’ve held back on posting until now while Storm's overworked Marketing team get the customer newsletter out to avoid stealing all their thunder. As usual, this is a mix of “duh, of course, like that's news?” type stuff and some “what are you smoking!?” ideas that may well be way off the mark! Here goes:

Obviously the desktop hardware technology “refresh” will get going as IT budgets are approved and laptop and desktops using Intel’s new super fast core 2 duo chip’s start hitting corporate desks in earnest; followed closely by the early adopters of Microsoft’s much awaited new operating system ‘Vista’. (The more cautious of us will wait for Service Patch 1 or even 2 to appear!)

On the bandwidth front - Broadband, now far from broad, will continue to drop in price, but I doubt as much as we have seen in the last 18 months. I can't even recall who started the argy-bargy, but at one stage MTN appeared to have created a new benchmark at around R0.20/MB. It was allegedly intended to be a limited duration half-price special, but showed what could be done.  Sentech announced they planned providing more bang for buck;  Vodacom then dropped their price (by 61% according to their ads) after being almost double everyone else’s price. iBurst also dropped their pricing, but remain more expensive than Sentech for equivalent packages (sub HSDPA theoretical speeds). The unlicensed players like Amobia and Uninet are still an order of magnitude cheaper but don’t have the coverage advantage. It is all a bit confusing for the man in the street, but ultimately these changes will make getting online and staying there permanently, more affordable. Offerings should start to differentiate on quality (reliability of throughput) and you should be able to get fixed IP addresses – currently not available to ADSL users. This will facilitate hooking up remote offices for voice and data over IP.

More telco’s will announce moves to converge their voice and data networks onto IP based New Generation Networks like British Telecom’s 21st Century Network project. This will make networks more intelligent and flexible, but will unfortunately not impact on customers for some time to come.

Video on Demand is growing overseas (where real broadband exists) – people are prepared to pay a premium over the likes of Mr Video et al to choose their viewing for the evening from their armchair. Don’t hold your breath here – we’re too spread out geographically to make it profitable just yet (maybe satellite will save us). And Telkom still dominates the local loop.

IPTV is being touted by vendors as the next big thing. Again, dependent on broadband, and ownership of content will be key! It will not be over the Internet, but over managed IP networks.

Music and video downloads, both legal and illegal, continue to grow. More cell phones with better mp3 players will eventually make people wonder why they have a CD player, but probably not this year! Apple’s iPhone will develop a cult following but will hardly make a dent in Nokia’s global market dominance.

Instant Messaging (IM) will continue to grow. Local mobile phone based instant messaging service, MXIT (Think MSN messenger on your phone) will find ways of “growing up” and becoming more respectable. IM will start making deeper inroads into corporate culture with IT managers needing to develop policies on IM usage.

WiMAX equipment will drop in price as the economies of scale kick in and more networks other than Sprint Nextel in the USA do mass roll-outs. It will continue to disappoint those who believed all the hype w.r.t. 70Mbps @ 70 miles @ 70mph. Some Meshed WiFi networks will appear here in SA, whether legal or not, and we’ll continue to see a LAN technology play in open spaces it was never intended for. Unlicensed Mobile Access, with VoWiFi phones following along behind, causing Mobile Networks to get edgy.

Spectrum is being fiercely fought over. It is a scarce resource and it is unlikely that anyone other than a few established players will get licenses. There will be many frustrated wannabes.

Municipal networks are coming to the fore, with the Cape Town tender awarded, but challenged, eThekweni ready to roll but caught up with legalities, and City of Joburg now out on tender. They are unlikely to have any real impact this year. They do not really have much of a sustainable advantage in the long run, as they will have to allow others access to infrastructure and will find that building a telco is not trivial.

The Mobile networks will announce HSUPA with great fanfare. Mobile broadband will then be about as broad as it gets for a while, but as up- and down-load speeds will be around 5Mbps, it will make quadplay (or fourplay?) possible – mobile/voice/internet/video.

Mobile interconnect prices are due to come down by 20 to 25% shortly. This should allow Telkom to drop the price of calls to mobile phones – whether they will pass on the full benefit or not will have to be seen. Mobile packages are unlikely to change as a result though. Least Cost Routing will become more and more marginal and the shift to Communication Service Providers using VoIP will be become more obvious.

Asterisk, the open source “IPPBX” will continue to make some serious inroads into the PBX market, with damage being done at a “higher level” in the market than originally proposed – medium to large corporates instead of SME’s. Watch the call centres here – they’re the weather vane of change.

Hosted IPPBX’s will start emerging as broadband improves and investors in some of the early VoIP entrants who committed large capex in these sorts of solutions seek to get ROI moving.

Social Networking using web based applications like MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, blogs, Second Life etc will become more widely known and used as people get used to being online 24*7. We’re seeing South African flavours of these appearing.

DSL and SSL VPN’s will become more popular as DSL prices drop and quality improves and mobile broadband grows. Business will seek help to set up and manage increasingly complex networks of devices.

As broadband improves in throughput, price and reliability, ASP services will become more popular, with companies seriously considering (but possibly not committing to just yet) such things as Getting Things Done, Gmail and Office packages from the likes of Google rather than Microsoft (from one evil empire to another!?).

VoIP will start emerging as more than just a cost saving exercise with some of the first real value adds starting to come through, with integration into calendars, address books, CRM’s and PBX’s.

There will be a lot of consolidation in the next few years, with bigger players buying smaller, more niche players to fulfill the need to have broader voice and data offering.

Oh, and Neotel will start taking on Telkom in the retail market and Infraco will make its clumsy and controversial way onto the stage…

(and if I look back on my 2006 predictions... if we see half of these during 2007, we'll be doing well! :( )

Dave Gale

March 2007

Is this war? Broadband(ish) style

 

Few things ruin your evening relaxing at a 5–star guest house in a lush Westville suburb (if you travel to Durban on business… there is no place like Ntengu Lodge – service as it should be defined at prices you pay at City Lodge!) like getting a call from SAfm’s AMLive to ask if you’ll comment at 06h35 next morning on Vodacom’s recent broadband price reductions (eh?  I thought it was MTN dropping prices?!).  Shove a microphone or camera at me and my palms wet themselves!  Not quite sure where they got the idea that Storm is a telecoms analysis outfit… need to work on our branding more! :/

So, armed with my HSDPA card and my coal-powered laptop, I started to catch up on recent events, but not before I’d asked Sentient to do some research.  Amazing how quickly one can assimilate info with an pseudo-broadband IP connection!  (please… you cannot call sub 2Mbps true broadband)

Is it a price war or not?  Opinions seem to be divided.  Roger from Sentient:

It may or may not be a price war... but if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, there is a reasonable chance it's a waterfowl of species anatidae

I tend to agree, but then what is the difference between a brief skirmish and a full out war?  The determination to hold one’s position?  What difference will this make to consumers?  With all the recent jockeying, there is a lot of confusion over the various offerings.  MyADSL is always a good source of info on local broadband as Rudolf and his merry mates are fixated on it.  Yes, yes, I know… that why it is actually called MyADSL!

I have no idea if Telkom are going to fire a retaliatory broadside and turn this into a real firefight.  History leads me to doubt it.  But if they don’t, they will lose business to HSDPA, iBurst and MyWireless.  Even with self-install as an option, it is easier (and cheaper) to sign up for wireless.  Cheaper despite the fact that wireless networks are more expensive to deploy.  And don’t forget that the most of the copper has been in the ground way past its ROI period.  I certainly hope Telkom retaliates.

But price is only one aspect.  I want DSL that doesn’t fall asleep on the job, like some Cabinet Ministers we know.  Let’s see some differentiation on contention ratios for a start.  And I still have to hear when we’re going to get access to some of the fibre that is supposedly being force fed down cable ducts… <sigh>

Anyway, all this got me wondering how one can compare the various offerings so I took a stab at creating a graphic to make it a bit easier (click on the thumb-nail below).  I’m not convinced I shouldn’t have opted for bars of some sort, but after giving up on the bubble representation on the data in Excel, I resorted to creating a balloon farm of my own.  Let me know if you spot some errors. And lets have some bright spark track down a Web2.0 app we can hook up to MyADSL and make some sense of it all.

That’s me.

ps.  Joe has just chastised me (and rightly so) that I’ve left out Amobia and Uninet.  An oversight I will address after I’ve had some sleep!