So here I am, sitting in Kampala, Uganda — writing a post whilst streaming my music collection from home…

And it works. Amazingly well.

Sure, I’m on the backend of a a 5mbps Wimax CPE connect to an Airspan WiMAX network, and I”m connecting to a base station 7kms away from my hotel.

The network is optimised with seriously badass caching, bandwidth management, and sattelite acceleration and compression that my company Neology has deployed.

And it rocks. Aside from the latency (which cannot be avoided until Seacom lands in Kampala next month) I have a better connection than I normally have at home.

I wish all ISP’s would focus on the little tiny details that make stuff work….

For example, we’ve developed software that makes the provisioning of a WiMAX CPE painless. And it’s only 2.25mb and a single .exe and contains the firmware for the modem!

Want a static IP address ? Simply buy one of Tangerine’s Silver packages at a CAP and speed that suits you.

Aside from Internet Slowlutions on South Africa, it’s a fairly unfound product in the South African market.

Caps ? No. All product simply throttle you to half-speed after having reached a (very gratuitous) cap of 10Gig or so.

And this is all over satellite. One of the most expensive uplink mechanisms in the world. And the economics make sense.

It makes me grumble about the pricing in South Africa.

I’ve been in networking, and at the bad end of Traffic Limits all my life. This is simply a by-product of living in South Africa, and Telkom’s stranglehold on the local market and the way in which they sell their services.

Imagine the following:

1. A service over Telkom ADSL that charges you different rates for Local or International usage, on the same CAP. 1GB suddenly becomes 10GB local-only traffic.

2. A service over Telkom ADSL that allows you to do pop3 for free?

3. A service over Telkom ADSL that allows you to play games on local servers, and limits you to 64kbps international so that you can still authenticate with your favorite game ? The local bandwidth tho, doesn’t cost you a cent!

4. A service where local uploads are free? Torrents that you seed from a specific port (e.g. 6668) will only ever use local bandwidth, and the said local bandwidth is free? Backup your PC’s to your ISP’s storage system – for FREE.

5. A service where you get a free static IP address ?

6. A service where you can use your 2Gig cap at a rate of 1 byte per byte during the day, but at night, your rate is 1/tenth the price of the daytime traffic ?

7. A combination of all of the above?

How many permutations are possible!.

Endless. And it can be done. Watch this space.

This could be one of those, “I finally gave in and installed a blogging tool” posts, but it’s not. I’ve imported all my old wiki/blog content, and am now officially part of the this thing called blogging that has become so popular.

I would have put a disclaimer here. But if you break your iBurst modem you have only yourself to blame, so no disclaimer. This was posted on the MyADSL forums, and people wanted to keep it secret, for fear of dimwits breaking their modems. Realistically, what difference is it going to make?

It is possible to telnet into you iBurst UT-D. Its quite simple:

* Connect UT-D via ethernet cable
* Set your ethernet connections’ IP to 192.168.250.5
You can also do this by simply adding an additional IP under the “Advanced Tab” under TCP/IP properties, if you don’t feel like changing your main IP.
* Open a command prompt (Start->Run->cmd.exe) Then type:

telnet 192.168.250.10 1234


If everything went well you should see a prompt from the UTD. If your networking is *incorrectly* configured, you will see a message saying “Connecting To 192.168.250.10… and it will appear to freeze there. Check everything again, if that’s the case.

!At the UTD prompt:
* Type “rfScan debug 2”, without the quotes. Hit enter.
* You will be presented with the base station # and the signal strength in dB and the distance and load of the BS.
* Once you are done type “rfScan debug 0”
* Kill the telnet session.

You should technically just be able to reboot the UTD too, to disable the debug mode.

Keyboards suck. I hate them. I will personally give the person who invents a better mechanism of interacting with a computer (input wise) a medal.

Ideally, I think it needs to be something like a skull plug. Or an integrated neural/chip setup, such as THIS thing:

I sit in front of a computer a lot. I can handle pretty much anything about it, the stiff neck, the sore legs even the blurred vision after hours and hours of staring at a screen. What I cannot handle is my thumbs and fingers literally spasming due to too much Ctrl-V, Ctrl-C, :wq, and alt-tabbing. I’ve gone to extremes. I’ve remapped the oddest keys on my keyboard to fit more use functions, just to avoid a thumb busting ctrl-c combination. I’ve trained myself to use both hands for shift states, and alt-key combinations. I avoid the mouse.

But it still sucks.

I want a skullplug. Or a telepathetic link. Or something. Anything! As longs as it’s not mechanical. In fact, if they were ever to announce “skull-plug beta testing” I’d pretty much kill anyone that stands between me, and the “numero uno” position at the door of the beta testing clinic.