Cybersurf

Hello good morning – hope you have had a good break – and welcome to Cybersurf – your weekly program that gets you clicking. I am your Cyberhost – Steven Lang – and yes I have been clicking furiously this weekend – why? Because about two weeks ago, they installed MY ADSL at home.

Finally, I have a broadband connection that I can call my own. I got the home edition 384 DSL with a three gigabyte cap. This means that I can download three gigabytes of stuff from the internet every month.

How is it working so far? Right now, I can honestly say it is fantastic! Download speeds are great, surfing has become much less painful, and now I can easily download video and audio clips while reading world news.

My favourite pastime in the middle of the night is to listen to Brasilian radio stations while reading science stories. This I can now do without any interruptions for buffering. I am very happy with My ADSL – but, I must warn you that the installation process takes a loooooong time. Telkom says there is a long waiting list. It took over a month from the time I placed the order until the epic moment when I first logged on.

The second caveat is the price – bear in mind that South African ADSL costs a lot more than similar services in the UK, Korea, Tunisia, Egypt or most European countries – secondly when Telkom advertises its ADSL service it quotes you the prices of the line rental – it kind of forgets to mention that you will need a more expensive service provider to hook you up to the net.

So if Telkom says that it will cost R450 for ADSL – that might be technically true – but remember to budget at least another two hundred rand a month for the service provider.

If you are interested in getting ADSL you might want to know that there will be public hearings at ICASA from April 11 to 14^th on the pricing structures.

To sum up my initial take on ADSL – it is great, but over priced!

Radical change of focus……

The big news event of this week will probably be the elections in Zimbabwe and you might want to catch up on news there by logging on to some news web sites.

SABCnews.com has sent – Antoinette Lazarus - a dedicated reporter to Zimbabwe for the elections. This is the first time the SABCnews web site has sent a journalist to another country to cover an election. Her reports will be posted in a Special Feature on the SABCnews.com web site.

The Zimbabwean government has a rather antiquated site that says nothing about the elections, while the national parliament has a somwehat more modern look and feel

The MDC party has a strange web site – with one of the most unusual navigation formats I have ever seen. There is an outstretched hand in the bottom right hand corner, and as you roll the cursor over each finger, an explanation appears of what is in that particular section.

By the way – the Peter Pointer takes you to an extensive elections section.

The Zanu site which was last updated in September, only carries a few loose items about the elections. The site is not good.

If you would like the addresses of the sites mentioned in today’s program, please go to the cybersurf blog – type in the following address: cybersurf.blogspot.com – one more time – cybersurf.blogspot.com

That’s it for today, thanks for listening and remember to keeeeep on surfing.

Links

• Zimbabwe Government online
• Parliament of Zimbabwe
• Zimbabwe African National Union - Patriotic Front ZANU-PF
• Movement for Democratic Change - MDC