What technology is used? WiMax or VSAT?
I am not sure what it is. I don't think it is Wi_max. I can describe it for you. The Screamer rep told me it's long range Wi-Fi.
At home I have a half-moon shaped grill/dish pointed towards a 'base station'. From the fixed antenna on the roof there is a little box as well on the pole (probably a router of some kind), then a cable running into the house. The techie who installed it told me he's set it for DHCP. The cable is standard network cable and can go straight into a PC or cable router. In this case I've plugged it into my cable router (brought it with me from the UK) into the "internet" port on the cable router and I've done the appropriate settings on the router so that it not confuse the other end.
I have a static IP which, according to Speedtest.net is on Vodacom Business Network. My IP 41.0.61.161 if you wanna run test. I cannot assign any ports as I think it uses NAT.
On the 'base station' end I think this is nothing other than a 4mb (or several bonded) 4mb lines split into 256/512/1mb parts, or whatever capacity the client(s) require. At the base station my provider then assigns a speed to a subscriber. The receiver must be line of sight.
On my side I have nothing to do with Telkom and I don't even need a Telkom line.
So far I'm very happy with my connection. During business hours I get 65k p/sec max, and average 110k p/sec after 6pm. My provider told me that he's not throttling me. Because I'm sucha friendly guy, He's giving me 1mb speed for the price of 512k ! Over the last 3 weeks I must've downloaded close to 40Gb. Catching up on 6 months' podcasts, I'm subscribed to around 28 podcasts on iTunes, most of them dance/trance DJ mixes.
Since joining Screamer ost things I was used to use when I lived in the UK are now useable again (some are
almost useable, needing at least a 8mb connection). Examples of what I can use now is web radio at 128k, browsing and Youtube in low res 360p.
My only complaint is since starting to use this service I'm no longer able to use Steam. Steam just times out or takes hours just to display my list of games I previously bough on Steam (when I lived in the UK).
I haven't tried torrents yet, but seems like my newsgroups and newsBin (I use Giganews with NewsBIN as client program) would also not work. newsBin responds to searches but nothing downloads. So I guess some ports must be blocked/throttled on the ISP side. Considering where in the sticks I live, I'm just happy to have a connection. To get my games from Steam I'm mailing my hard disk to my brother in Netherlands to do my downloads, that is a lot faster than downloading it here in S-Africa !