Written by Jean Dennis, Traffic Intergrated Marketing Cape Town – The somewhat one million tourists and soccer revellers visiting the country during the 2010 Soccer World Cup led to a significant surge in the demand for high quality bandwidth when many of them flocked to popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter and local news site Sports24.co.za, which saw over 1 million unique users during this period. “Users on the micro-blogging site, Twitter, set a new record on June 14 posting 940 tweets per second in the 30 seconds following Japan’s World Cup win against African team, Cameroon. This is about 200 tweets per second more than the average,” says Henk Kleynhans, CEO and co-founder of premium Wi-Fi hotpot provider, Skyrove. “At Skyrove, we saw a significant increase in bandwidth demand from our hospitality venue clients as many of the international visitors not only engaged on social networking sites, but communicated with loved ones in their home countries via email and instant messaging and uploaded photos of their fan experience in South Africa.” “Usage at restaurants, cafes and hotels using Skyrove’s Business-Class Wi-Fi solution was 78% higher during the World Cup. We recently started delivering free Wi-Fi vouchers to users via SMS and ensured that payment with credit card was quick and easy for end-users and hassle-free for busy location owners.” While emailing and social networking remain the mainstay of web usage, tourists used the internet for sharing photos, swapping music, uploading videos and making Skype calls to their friends and family. As a result, these tourists were far more demanding of their wireless connectivity and expected Wi-Fi hotspot providers to cope with the increase in bandwidth usage. Skyrove’s hospitality venues were prepared for this by ensuring they offered wireless connectivity that was easy to access, reliable and consistent across the entire property and did not leave guests feeling frustrated with slow, unreliable internet and inconsistent coverage. Says Kleynhans, “We are confident that Skyrove’s offering for hospitality venues will be able to cope with the ever increasing demand for high-quality Wi-Fi hotspot service following the positive feedback from guests and venue owners during the 2010 World Cup.”

According to statistics published by Speedtest.net, South Africa’s internet speeds are slower than those in Rwanda, Uganda, Tunisia and even Azerbaijan.

The statistics are collated from more than 1.6 billion crowdsourced - that is, done by individual internet users - speedtests done at the website Speedtest.net and through its iPhone and Android apps.

The good news is that South Africa - at an average 2.32 Mbps - is faster than the average African download speed of 1.6 Mbps. The slowest speeds in the world are the be found in Zambia, at an average 0.26 Mbps.

Test your own connection speed at Speedtest.net. Also have a look at Pingtest.net to get a good idea of whether your connection will work for VoIP and gaming.

Note: Speedtest.net & Pingtest.net are owned by Ookla, which was started by entrepreneur, former cab driver, SpeakEasy founder and allround great guy Mike Apgar)

 

 

 

 

 

Stefano Zacchiroli became the new Debian Project Leader earlier this year. In my opinion he’s doing quite good at delivering on his promises so far. In particular, I like how he’s reached out to Ubuntu as part of communicating better with Debian derivatives. In May he provided a talk at the Ubuntu Developer Summit titled “Collaboration with Ubuntu (from a Debian point of view)” (video).

Not sure if this is as a direct result of Stefano’s efforts (and as pointed out in the comments, it isn’t), but the last week we gained 2 new Ubuntu members who have already been long-time Debian contributors. Both report that the process didn’t take too long:

• Raphaël Hertzog gained Ubuntu membership directly
• Gerfried Fuchs gained membership through MOTU

Raphaël is also involved with Utnubu, a collaboration layer between Debian and Ubuntu that’s currently being revived. Gerfried has been active in MOTU doing sync requests from Debian to Ubuntu as well as loads of bug triaging.

It’s great to see that there’s more links being formed between the two projects! Welcome again to our new members from Debian!

After a long wait for my travel documents I finally arrived in Montréal, Canada on Friday afternoon!

Sherbrooke will be my new home from now on. I have lots to say but if I do that now this blog entry will never get finished, I’ll do some subsequent posts instead

So far everyone I’ve met here have been super nice, I’ve met quite a few of my colleges at Revolution Linux over the weekend and tomorrow is my first day actually at the office (already had a tour yesterday ). It’s certainly taking some adjustment being here but I’ve already had Poutine and learned some important local words so I’m already on my way to becoming an official Québécois!

I’ve been more or less absent from everything the last two weeks, but that should also be better now. Have a good week!

WAPA would like to thank the following WAPA members: - Internet Solutions, for hosting our Management Committee meetings and regulatory workshop this year, as well as for sponsoring our teleconference facilities. - MB-Net for providing us with a free fax 2 email line. - Trinet Online for assisting us with the printing of our high site [...]

The following goals have been identified by the WAPA management committee and will be WAPA’s main focus in 2010: 1. Spectrum: Light Licensing Strategy ; Getting spectrum allocated for use by WAPA members 2. Awareness: Promoting Wireless ISP services to the wider public ; Roadshows to attract more members 3. Self-regulation: High Site Training and Enforcement 4. Services to members: [...]

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I've been running Windows 7 for a while now on my desktop and this weekend installed it on my Acer Aspire One netbook. Here are the applications I'll be keeping on a USB Flash Drive for future installs: 

My iWeek presentation about WAPA and wireless industry self regulation: 2009-09-02-wapa.pdf (90KB)

From an interview with EngineerIT: Self-regulation is the way to go

Can’t say I like that photo too much but it’s a good article.

This blog has been a bit quiet for a long time.. so here is something I found on our sales mailing list today which Abz sent to explain our entry level solutions..

We differ from most consumer oriented ISPs in that we specialize in custom specific solutions and the way our products and services are structured.

For instance, if you wanted to host a static website, domain, and 3 email addresses you could probably get a shared hosting package from one of the popular consumer ISPs for R20/m.

We can do all of the above, but we don’t offer shared hosting so we would either give you rack space in our data centre to host your own server(s) or offer you your own dedicated server with Apache, PHP, etc pre-installed, a mail server and domain hosting. Our quotation would look something like:

Xen Virtual Server (128MB Memory, 3GB Disk Space) @ R 250 + R 70/m

Mail Server @ R 600 + R 295/m

Domain Hosting @ R 30 + R 12/m

Internet (1GB, 20c/MB thereafter) @ R 370/m

Labour (1 hour @ R 550/h - Web/FTP setup) @ R 550

Total: R 1430 + R 747/m

As you can see a lot more expensive.

But now let’s say you want a firewall in front of your servers, you have an office which you want to connect to the Internet, some staff members that have ADSL at home, and you want to manage all of your services for you, we could add offer you an ADSL package which is uncapped, bandwidth shared among all your accounts for your staff members, an ADSL VPN / Wireless for your office with static ips, direct connectivity to your hosted services at our data centre, we’ll take over the ADSL lines from Telkom and manage them for you, offer you a managed firewall, etc.

As you can see, you don’t necessarily need to be a big company to deal with us, but it doesn’t really make a lot of business sense to say only host a website and domain with us. If we look at all your connectivity needs it may be a completely different story.

Joe created a brief intro document about SchoolWAN for a tuXlabs and school connectivity workshop (2009-02-25).

Please note that we have updated our ISPA Code of Conduct Compliance details. You’ll find our Content Take Down Policy and Acceptable Use Policy here.

SchoolWAN is now an associate member of WAPA, the Wireless Access Providers’ Association of South Africa.