Cybersurf

Hello, good morning and welcome to Cybersurf – your weekly window where the web matters – I am your friendly Cyberhost, Steven Lang. Today’s program is crammed full of info and addresses – but if you miss any of them – never fear, in about three minutes I’ll tell you where you can find the full script for Cybersurf.

Let’s get cracking – big news this last week was the announcement that the government is finally going to give a licence to a second national telephone operator - or SNO.

Why should we care – this is after all – an Internet program and not a phone program? Well the reason we should care is that an SNO will offer competition against the existing fixed line monopoly – this means that the availability of Internet bandwidth should increase, and prices should come down.

Broadband Internet access is cheaper in other countries where there is competition.

Who knows . . . . soon we might even have real broadband and affordable prices.

And if you are asking “why do you need broadband Internet access?” – you would certainly benefit from it if you wanted to download maps from an interesting site called www.themaps.co.za.

A listener by the name of Peter Slingsby suggested that I mention this site for travellers intending to spend some time in the Cape over the festive season. The site has many tourist oriented maps of the region – the free maps appear to concentrate on the hiker type of user – there are maps of Cape Point, Kirstenbosch, the Sevilla Rock Art Trail and others.

I have not had an in depth scout around the site – but if you are the outdoors type and plan on spending some time in the Western Cape – you will do well to look at www.themaps.co.za

Another tip sent on by a listener comes from Paul Janisch at EagleFord where they are now auctioning cars online. The very first car to go under the auctioneers mouse button went for R99 500 even though the recommended retail price was almost seventeen thousand rand more – sounds like a bargain to me.

At the next online auction – which opens on Wednesday – four vehicles – two new and two used will be up for grabs. Personally I think that if you know what vehicles should cost, you can score a bargain with an online auction. If you are interested, check out the site at www.eagleford.co.za.

And so we wrap up today’s edition of cybersurf, if you would like to read the script for the program, please go to www.cybersurf.blogspot.com – one more time www.cybersurf.blogspot.com - thanks for listening, next week, same time, same place till then . . . . . remember to keep on surfing.

Hello good morning and welcome to Cybersurf, your weekly window on web matters, I am your Cyberhost Steven Lang and after a weekend of incredible sporting achievements, one cannot ignore some sporting sites.

I think Saturday’s victory in the tri-nations cup deserves a web site all on its own – what a fantastic win – but the real big story of last week and next week has been and is the Olympic games in Athens.

As one would expect, the IOC has set up a massive, detailed web site for the occasion. You can find the official site at www.athens2004.org and there are at least a gazillion other Olympic related sites in every nook and cranny of the Internet.

The official site is comprehensive if nothing else. It has absolutely every schedule of every event of the two week games. It also has all times and results of all the events. It has a great photos sections and the news department on the front page is excellent, but not always quite as up to date as one would hope. Perhaps that is a bit uncharitable, but after the fifty metre mens’ free style race there seemed to be a long delay in getting the results up.

On the sabcnews.com web site there is a dedicated category featuring stories about the Olympics – you can find the section at the following address: www.sabcnews.com/sport/olympics.

This section focuses firstly on the performances South African competitors and secondly on other African athletes. Who will ever forget the absolutely magnificent performance of Kenenisa Bekele as he imperiously powered his way to victory in the men’s ten thousand metre track event?

SABC sport – which can be found at www.sabcsport.co.za has a dedicated Olympics portal attached to its site. You can click on a button on the right hand side of the page to go to the portal site or you can type in the following address:
http://athens2004.sabc.co.za/portal/site.

The site is useful if you want a particularly South African spin on the Olympics – there are photos of South African competitors and a section that I particularly liked called Trackside Comment. SABC sports reporter Eben Jansen send his own personal observations directly from Athens.

Of great practical value is the broadcast schedule section that tells you when each Olympic event will be broadcast on either SABC Radio or SABC TV.

As all Olympics sites, the SABC sport offereing also has a medals table.

If you missed any of the addresses I read out, never fear, I will put this entire script on the internet at http://www.cybersurf.blogspot.com – one more time: http://www.cybersurf.blogspot.com


And that wraps up the Athens Olympics edition of Cybersurf – thanks for listening – tune in again next Monday morning same time and same place and remember to keep on surfing

Hello, good morning and how do you do - this is Cybersurf - your weekly window on web matters. I am your faithful Cyberhost, Steven Lang. Today's program is choc full of the good, the bad and the ugly news so let's get the bad out of the way.

Last week, huge numbers of South African Internet surfers could not use foreign sites for several hours at a time. There was clearly a big problem in accessing international bandwidth - and when we have a problem of such magnitude - we really have to find someone to blame. In searching for scapegoats, cursors were instinctively pointed at Telkom or IS - the Internet Solution - or both.

ITWeb says that IS had suffered its third unplanned outage in three weeks. IS sent letters apologizing and explaining the problem to its customers - of which the SABC is one.

Telkom said nothing. Having great difficulty understanding all the technical jargon - I gather that there was a problem with the SAT three cable that connects South African Internet users to the rest of the world - and some of the blame rests with Telefonica SA - a Spanish company that manages the cable.

Personally, I believe that both IS and Telkom should build in more bandwidth and more redundancy so that when there is a problem with one cable, then Internet users should have access to other cables, other ISPs, other phone companies and maybe a satellite or two – but I don't think that the department of communications is keen on opening the market to competition.

Next on our list – the ugly news – ugly is the spat concerning two web sites and Telkom. The two sites in question – hellkom.co.za and telkomsucks dot co dot za are both what I call venting sites – places where you can go and vent your anger at some large organization – in this case both sites – Hellkom and telkomsucks - vent their bile at the country's fixed line telephone monopoly.

Now this is ugly because both sites are quite nasty, but on the other hand, it is really ugly that Telkom should threaten to sue Hellkom for R5 million on the ground that it constitutes "hate speech" – Come on Telkom – you are the big boy on the block – no need to get upset if a few kids call you names.

Now for the good news – The ICT empowerment Charter is moving ahead well and should be released sometime this month. The aim of the charter is to empower more black people in the information technology sector. It has long been recognized that the IT sector is very much
the domain of the pale male – the new charter aims to correct this imbalance to achieve a more representative sector.

The new BEE charter will most certainly be in place by the target date of March first 2005.

To round off with some more good news, Doom Three, the computer game that everyone under the age of 25 has been waiting for was finally released at Northgate on Friday. According to gamers, the most eagerly anticipated game in history has lived up to expectations and everyone
seems to be very happy.

And there you have it – the good, the bad and the ugly – not necessarily in that order. That's it for today, please tune in to Cybersurf next Monday and do remember – to keep on surfing………..,

Cybersurf is a weekly web site review program broadcast on SAfm every Monday morning. This is a transcript of an interview with Winston Smith, spokesperson of Sentech. The interview is a response to several consumer complaints about the MyWireless product of Sentech.

We asked Winston Smith for his response to the complaints:

Winston Smith:The complaints that we received were clearly often justified. We've had numerous complaints about it. We've looked carefully at each and every complaint identified what they are about, looked at those that were specific to the, let's call it the speed issue, which was number one in terms of the complaints from our customer base And largely what we decided was we're going to identify the problem and also look at how we can resolve that. We've done that in effect . We've put in place a project plan as a four week timeline. It ended towards the end of August, and that timeline, a number of things have been identified.

One we've looked at how we're going to improve the speed or perception of speed to the end user and we implementing a new software bandwidth management tool that will allow us to properly and more effectively and most importantly - fairly share the bandwidth across the user base so that the users will get an equitable share of their bandwidth which is clearly not the case before.We were having many users experiencing sometimes, more than the package actually allowed and at the same time other users experiencing very slow speeds consistently. So that was a problem we've identified, as I say put a plan in place to correct that as well.

QUESTION:You said that by the end of August things should be more or less resolved - at that point, what can you user expect.

Winston Smith: The expectation of the user should be that I need to have an acceptable service. The quality or speed is directly related to the perception of how fast my download is, how fast my browsing access is or my e-mail is and quite clearly we've had many users that are very happy with the service that is at the moment - so we've taken that perception of service we've done our own testing clearly we are busy still testing with the new bandwidth management software to identify what is the measurement that will give me a happy feeling as a customer and a feeling of - yes! Sentech is delivering a service that I expected and required.

It is a shared bandwidth platform that means the bandwidth is shared across the user base. We cannot at today's high bandwidth cost provide a dedicated connection for every single user, and unfortunately that's not possible today.However, what we'd like to do is provide a service that will give the user a feeling that the competitiveness if the MyWireless product, that Sentech is offering is better than that of my fellow competitors in the market.

Q: I notice that you are very careful not to be tied down to a number – you promised equitable service but does this mean that you're going to consistently keep expanding your customer base and not increase the bandwidth base?

Winston Smith: Definitely not. Steven - the bandwidth is very much a dynamic factor it is attributed directly and related directly to the number of users on the network at any one time as well as the number of users that are signing up. When we apply the bandwidth to the product, we look at both the local bandwidth which allows us to surf in the 'za' domain space and the international bandwidth which allows you to get access to sites sitting out the country.

We look at that bandwidth, we look at the number of users we look at the ‘package’ pertaining to the users and we apply the bandwidth accordingly we then regularly update that bandwidth to meet the requirement or the growth of the user base.So that is on the bandwidth side, however, the bandwidth that we have right now, when fairly and properly and I can say properly managed to be fair to each user will be sufficient to give a good service.

Q: At what point do you know to increase the bandwidth to the user base

WS:Yes, we look at the bandwidth in a, let's call it the bandwidth in a pool of which there are users and for want of a reference, I would say the MyWireless 128 customer base we look at that bandwidth and say that based on this number this is the amount of bandwidth that I require to meet a particular service level for that customer base.When I reach, let's call it 75% of that capacity, I simply increase the bandwidth so that I am at all times able to offer the same consistent service to the user base at any time.

Q: That bandwidth that you consider a reasonable base is that equivalent to a dial-up, is that equivalent to an ISDN or to ADSL.

WS: I’d like to equate the services directly to those three products I would like to say that we equate the lowest package to at least that of a dial-up and a good dial-up hat is a any one time. So the minimum one should get is that of a dial-up connection on the lowest product and ISDN fo the middle one and comparable and better than ADSL on the upper product.

Q: Another one of the gripes with your offering has been the 24 month contract that you are required to sign. Don't you have some kind of easy opt out of it.

WS: Yes, Steven we have right now at the moment we've also added an unbundled based on the user requirement feedback hat we've got from our user base as well as prospective customers said why don't you allow me to buy the modem, albeit that its expensive at the moment we are aware of that and hen offer the product at a cheaper cost. then in terms of the service.

We've done that. We've added a twelve month option as well now so we have 24 month and 12 month option on the unbundled packages and we also. Any user is able to move out of a contract if the service they're getting is not acceptable and deemed not acceptable to them. We would not like to keep an unhappy customer simply due to a paper contract but that said however, we would be looking in the future to other methods other means of offering and perhaps you could read that the way cellular started, they way they went over time towards the prepaid model.That's probably the direction we'll be looking at in the future.