Today, Mark Cuban blogged about the old saying, “When You Have a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail“. Too often in todays world we try to make the internet a solution to everything, just because we as technologists understand it, can control it, and have access to it.

While I am definitely an advocate for more internet proliferation and believe that Africa still desperately needs more of it, it’s use and application doesn’t always make it the silver bullet to all of our productivity and business problems.  As an Internet Service Provider we see ourselves as “enablers”, rather than “fixers”, more like a hammer manufacturer rather than the one wielding the hammer. Our clients use our Data Centre’s, our broadband and our other services in order to deliver their own solutions or to solve a business need.

Today, in our Cape Town office we installed a whiteboard in our sales team area in order to track, communicate and monitor the progress of our sales team. We could have used an online system or built a system ourselves, but the R 950 whiteboard just does the job better than anything else!

Dont get me wrong, Facebook is cool and I am all for social bookmarking and online collaboration but how, when and for what tasks you use the internet will ultimately define you and your overall success.

We as service providers are going to keep enabling! How will you be using what we provide?

It has been confirmed, Telkom has increased the ADSL Broadband upload speeds. We have confirmed that one of our 4MB testing lines has been upgraded to 512k.

Upload speeds for all 3 line types have been adjusted. All 384k lines will be upgraded to 128k upload (from 64k), all 512k lines will be upgraded to 256k from 192k.

This is great news as more data calls will be able to be pushed over a single DSL line. This affects services like VoIP and sending of large emails and documents from an office will also now be faster than before.

Due to popular customer demand, we’ve decided to include a 30GB Business DSL Fibre package to our Business DSL offering. Geared to fill the gap between the 10 and 50GB options, the new 30GB option is available to you as of today!

Since the inclusion of our new Capped Business DSL range, we’ve had great feedback from customers who’ve enjoyed enhanced performance & throughput, with speed tests coming in just short of the maximum 4MB/s maximum download speed.

International ping times are also vastly improved with the fibre option (300ms) in comparison to the traditional satellite option (750ms), enabling faster international browsing, quicker VPN’s and improved VoIP service speeds.

How do we achieve this? – by using Virtualization technology: Virtualization in the context of server hosting, is the practice of creating multiple ‘virtual’ servers using one single physical server. This is done in such a way, that the Virtual Servers behave and appear as if they were separate physical servers. Each Virtual Server can have it’s own Operating System installed that can be rebooted independently.

This is done using a software virtual machine monitor, such as ‘Xen’, which acts as the primary application layer, allowing another layer of multiple guest operating systems to be installed on each virtual server.

In short, Virtualization gives you the luxury of multiple Operating Systems, without the cost of extra hardware.

RSAWEB’s Dedicated Server packages all come with a Virtualization option at no extra charge, allowing clients to install their own choice of 4 different Operating Systems. Virtualization works with both Windows and Linux, allowing you the ability to run them both on one server.

Need more info? speak to one of our account managers on 0861 RSAWEB.

We previously covered the proposed Telkom ADSL upload speed increase trial in our post in February, news posted today confirms that the ADSL line speed on the 4 Mb/s ADSL service will be increased to an upload speed of 512 kbps from the end of June. This is a marginal increase from the current 384 kbps, but will allow for better throughput for 2 way services like VOIP and ADSL VPN.

So, using a VOIP example:

If you use the G729a VOIP codec (40kbps per voice channel) you will be able to have 12 simultaneous voice channels, previously you could only engage 9 channels safely with an upload speed of 384 kbps. So for no extra cost you will now get an extra 3!

ADSL 4Mbps service = 384Kbps upload. (Current)
to
ADSL 4Mbps service = 512Kbps upload. (end June)