Sign up with GoogleI've just noticed the (somewhat old news new if you have been reading sites other than ITweb) story about Telkom introducing a package deal which gives customers a free ADSL modem with a 24 month contract.
Before anybody reading who doesn't yet have ADSL rushes off to go and sign away up to R16 000 over two years, please think hard about this.
The modems provided by Telkom are generally priced extremely high, around R1500. You can do much better if you just shop around.
The price of the modem should not be a barrier to entry. We use a D-Link DSL300G, which acts as an ethernet bridge and allows us to connect to the internet over ADSL with a PPPoE client on our FreeBSD machine.
The DSL-300G is an excellent product, I purchased this one at a mere R750. It provides great stability and performance, and supports full web, telnet and SNMP management.
At R750, it is less than one month's rent for business ADSL users. Thus, instead of tying yourself into Telkom's ADSL for two years, you could just buy something like the DSL-300G at more or less one month's rent, and should something better than ADSL come along, you can sell the modem and change.
If you sign up for the contract deal, you are stuck using ADSL for two years, wether you want to or not.
Willie Viljoen
Web Developer
Adaptive Web Development
Before anybody reading who doesn't yet have ADSL rushes off to go and sign away up to R16 000 over two years, please think hard about this.
The modems provided by Telkom are generally priced extremely high, around R1500. You can do much better if you just shop around.
The price of the modem should not be a barrier to entry. We use a D-Link DSL300G, which acts as an ethernet bridge and allows us to connect to the internet over ADSL with a PPPoE client on our FreeBSD machine.
The DSL-300G is an excellent product, I purchased this one at a mere R750. It provides great stability and performance, and supports full web, telnet and SNMP management.
At R750, it is less than one month's rent for business ADSL users. Thus, instead of tying yourself into Telkom's ADSL for two years, you could just buy something like the DSL-300G at more or less one month's rent, and should something better than ADSL come along, you can sell the modem and change.
If you sign up for the contract deal, you are stuck using ADSL for two years, wether you want to or not.
Willie Viljoen
Web Developer
Adaptive Web Development