iburst in Canal Walk

[fergus]

Just to let anyone know thats interested I was in Canal Walk earlier with my laptop and iburst UTC. I usually sit with my laptop in Seattles while my wife does shopping and I thought I'd try out iburst from there. At first I got one of those nice comfy chairs in the lounge area but I think there was too much concrete around me cos I couldn't connect. After that I moved to a table more in the open on the Exclusive Books side and got 70 - 90% signal consistenly. Speeds were about 300k and I mainly used it for web, email, chat and one or two downloads. It sure beats those rip-off hotspots.

Btw if you like coffee try out the Americana. Its 3 espressos with hot water and makes for a delicious full flavoured cuppa coffee! Luvly

 

[ic]

Tempted to respond with "Juvly" - I think I could totally do with 3 Epressoz - I'm about to get a kbd imprint on my face...

Fergus, just wondering (since I've not taken a UTC for a test drive & UTD doesn't have a battery or use USB port power), how do you find the UTC, have you had up to 1MBits/s or more with it, any interesting hassles - like with the iBurst drivers etc? What OS are you using with the UTC?

 

[fergus]

My os is WinXP Home (and Suse but not yet setup with iburst). The reseller set up iburst for me on my laptop when I went to signup. I haven't bothered to check if theres any newer drivers or firmware yet. I haven't had any problems so far with my current ones.

My building actually has the iburst tower on its roof so you can imagine my signal is excellent. When I'm in my flat I only get 100% signal. On Friday I decided to go mobile and while I was driving from town to my flat I had Cape Talk streaming over the net. Except for 2 short lags while buffering it played fine all the way. I think my experiment at Canal Walk today was the furtherest I've been from a tower yet and I still managed to get good signal there.

In my flat I can totally max out the connection getting up to 120K. I timed how long it took to download 50 meg and it was just under 8 minutes. From Canal Walk I got about 30 - 40K if I'm not mistaken. I can't really comment on how good the UTC is compared to the UTD since I don't have any experience with the latter. If you wanted to test I guess you'd have to have both at the same location and compare signal. I know the UTD is meant to have a more powerful antenna so I imagine that ones signal would be better. But if you can attach an external antenna to the UTC it shouldn't make a difference. The only hassle I've had so far is when the whole of Cape Town went down for a short while earlier today. Oh, and just now when I spilt water all over my laptop but thats another story...

Whats your distance to the tower and how is your speed / reception?

 

[slimothy]

canal walk? i've never heard of that mall... is that in the west?

 

[fergus]

Its in Cape Town, if you drive down the N1 you can't miss it. Otherwise known as Century City. Home of Ratanga Junction. Next to Summer Greens and Ysterplaat. Etc, etc...