Out of curiosity, the technician told me that I would have to pay an extra R150 for him to do a firmware update on the modem, otherwise I have to do it myself.
That is exactly what he told me.
heh, amazing how something entirely reasonable wrongly presented can be so inflammatory.
I realise that it is that the R150 is for his time, I have never heard of companies charging for their firmware updates. I still think it is not right though because when I said that I can do it myself he asked me if I was sure that I knew what I was doing, because I could damage my modem. He made it sound like quite a complicated procedure, and not the simple "click on firmware update button". The procedure he used was: double click on a self extracting zip file on one of his *magic* cds, run the Wireless Broadband Modem Dialler, click update, wait, close it, double click on a second self extracting zip file on his *magic* cd, and do the same for that one.
I suppose that could be quite complicated for someone who is computer illiterate but I still think it's a cheap way to try to make an extra buck from the technician's side, especially if there is a simpler method that even a newbie can use.
Nevertheless, I didn't get charged for the firmware update in the end and I am happy with the service so far. I mostly get between 25% and 30% signal with no additional antena. My ping is around 190. I found an old antena lying around and I am going to try get my signal above 45% to start getting really good pings (hopefully). Rain doesn't interfere with my signal at all, the other day I was getting 29% signal while it was raining. The only thing that I don't like about it is the 60 sec international throttle, but where there is a will, there is a way
My next mission is to get the modem to work under Linux. Any way that I can get it to work under Mandrake 10? I checked
http://rodent.za.net/MyLinuxDrivers but that method is too complicated for me since I am a linux newbie
)
Cheers,
newb5000
Edit: about that 190ms ping I mentioned, that is in CS:S on almost all of the SGS servers. Sometimes it goes down to 165, sometimes up to 220. It remains the same regardless of how many players are connected. On the other hand, if I ping
www.sentech.co.za, it jumps around a lot but I would say average is 100-110ms:
Ping statistics for 66.18.65.124:
Packets: Sent = 13, Received = 13, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 54ms, Maximum = 194ms, Average = 107ms
