| br!ghtshark | » adsl

i’m soooooooo p’d off at telkom right now!

.h — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:59:32 +0000

And so, after a looooong wait, I finally received my line, adsl line and what not… happy days. But wait – this is Telkom, there should be something that goes wrong, right?

Right – I received my first bill today and guess what – the idiot installing technician has made some R30 worth of cellphone calls on my line after installing it! And guess who will now have to spend money to GET to telkom and time to sort it out….?

Bloody incompetent idiots! ARGH!

south africa’s narrow-band

.h — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:14:37 +0000

I recently visited http://www.speedtest.net/index.php, which allows one to test how fast one’s connection to the internet is.

I have a 384 kb/s adsl connection from Telkom and these are the stats that I got:

Even more interesting, are the results of the tests which have been done by other visitors to the speedtest site:

Japan 11319 kb/s 5221 kb/s
Sweden 7788 kb/s 2647 kb/s
Latvia 6744 kb/s 2563 kb/s
Romania 6085 kb/s 2920 kb/s
Bulgaria 5230 kb/s 2649 kb/s

Thus, Romania & Bulgaria’s AVERAGE speeds are higher than the speeds we can get as “special upgrade” on our fastest connections.

To put this in perspective, I got the following stats from Wikipedia:

SA’s GDP = $587 billion (18th worldwide)
Romania’s GDP = $210 billion (41st worldwide)
Bulgaria’s GDP = $26 billion (75th worldwide)

SA’s per capita = $13,3k (56th worldwide)
Romania’s per capita = $7,3k (65th worldwide)
Bulgaria’s per capita = $4,8k (80th worldwide)

More interesting facts from the speedtest site:

SA Average = 807 kb/s
Global Average = 3705 kb/s

SA’s country rank = 3% (ie, 97% of countries rate faster than SA).

SA’s ~~broadband~~ narrowband situation is a crying shame!

(Feel free to post your speedtest results in the comments by copy/pasting the image link into the comments box…)

being disconnected

.h — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:37:01 +0000

Is it possible to be disconnected in this modern world of social networking and always-n internet? I experienced something close to that for a month and for a modern-day information warrior, it was sure something to get used to!

With no daily dose of web browsing, not internet access, not at home, not at the office, no msn messenger, no gmail (other than on my mobile, not the ideal way to access it!), no del.icio.us, I realised how dependent I have become to my daily technology fix.

Soon I will have my new adsl line installed (only two more weeks!) and then I’ll be with a vengeance!