Ed, Shaun: Tower numbers please

16 = Kyalami Castle

16 is almost certainly Kyalami Castle

31 is probably (based on km distance Vorna Valley
 
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24 is Benoni.

Why can't they just release this info? It's not like they have any trade secrets wrapped up in the number=name correspondence of their towers. And the locations are revealed on their coverage maps. Well played Iburst.
 
peterleroux said:
Why can't they just release this info?
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Because they like feeling all powerful, and letting their customers (who are actually trying to help their other - normally very unhappy and p!ssed off - customers) beg for scraps of information
 
Plus, in the end, the information wants to be free, and does become freely available. There really is no point in them keeping it under wraps. Just look at cellular companies' cell-info. Man, they even use the base station information to ADVERTISE services.
 
In Eds support blog one of you guys (I'm assuming) asked for the tower numbers. He then gave feeded back on what people have said but ignored your comment, so I pointed this out and hes now replied about it.

Basically they still feel that it is confidential, even though the towers report their number so anyone could find it out using any of the iBurst monitoring apps if they wanted to.

ED's Support Blog said:
Nog'nuser, good point. Sorry User. Tower numbers are very confidential as they form part of the mechanics of our network. We have to protect our network and this means we need to keep the information to ourselves. Now I know that alot of signal testing/finding applications exist where the tower number is revealed. We can't stop that from happening though and we do encourage the use of signal find applications. Tower numbers also change as we roll out new base stations.

To user, I am sorry that I can't provide the tower numbers to you. I know alot of members on a forum site I frequently visit are asking me for these. The debate about how confidential these are and the damage it may cause still continues. One of these members has come up with a proposal for us and we are currently looking into it.

To EDB. Thank you, great idea. We currently have a large knowledgebase that we have built up over the years which covers sharing, failover and so on. We are considering to make this KB accessible through the website. It may not happen though and we may come up with a better way of providing info. Sorry I can't be more concrete.

In the meantime drop me an email and I'll rovide the information to you.
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I actually only finished reading it now. It actually would be a perfectly acceptable compromise for just the developers of these programs (Once again I assume thats who hes talking about) to get the tower numbers and then it would be fine for our purposes.
 
"confidential info" <-------- thats the biggest bit of BS comming out of his fingers and we all know that.
 
I wonder if iBurst has 2 sets of coverage maps: the actual coverage maps that are confidential and those advertised on the iBurst website...
 
The real point is that we are not interested in the actual numbers themselves, only insofar as they identify the towers. So what we really want is the towers, so that we can see which one we are connected to, and other towers that we could/might connect to from time to time.

The suggestion that Iburst provide an up-to-date encrypted files that can be used by uTraceStar to give accurate tower names is a good one. I can't see any reason why Iburst would not want to do this.

Otherwise you do have to ask the question: What use is the Network Status page on their website if there is no means of identifying which tower you are on?
 
@ ic - seems to be - because on their website I'm in an area with poor reception, but actual testing by an reseller proved that I'm in an area with good reception... or maybe their maps are outdated... hrm... :confused:
 
Their maps are based on guesswork. I don't think it is physically possible to have accurate maps without an army of signal testers in the field.

They are a guide, and exceptions are the rule.
 
Gatecrasher said:
Their maps are based on guesswork. I don't think it is physically possible to have accurate maps without an army of signal testers in the field.

They are a guide, and exceptions are the rule.
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Actually I recall that many moons ago, some WBS representatives bragged about using state of the art mapping software to chart & create the signal maps that WBS launched its iBurst service with, have they stopped using this s/w?
 
ic said:
Actually I recall that many moons ago, some WBS representatives bragged about using state of the art mapping software to chart & create the signal maps that WBS launched its iBurst service with, have they stopped using this s/w?
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There is RadioMobile which I have played with - gives very pretty coverage maps based on signal strength, antenna type, signal frequency, ground contours, etc

It does however make a few small aproximations - like permeable flora :D which is not quite the case in the rain forest that we call Johannesburg ;)
 
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