<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Karnaugh</i>
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The issue is that Telkom simply dont offer the option of a static IP on ADSL ( not that it isnt a standard feature ) and that they force IP resets every 12h or something to ensure that you *can't* have a permenant connection let alone IP. Thats obviously a blatent attempt to force use of diginet lines for people that need real guranteed static connections and static IP's (and they make a hell of a lot of money off of them)
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Collin,
As far as I can tell, that isn't the case. They do disconnect your PPPoE link every 24 hours, but they do not force an IP release. The disconnection doesn't really have any effect on us, our PPPoE client redials immediately [}
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Their DHCP servers actually seem to be standards compliant. Even with the disconnects, I have managed to use the same IP for ten days straight, without doing anything special, each time.
After ten days of course, the maximum DHCP lease time runs out and my machine *HAS* to ask for a new IP. That's pretty standard anywhere though.
I think the forced resets people are complaining about are the automatic disconnections every 24 hours. These are apparently designed to allow Telkom to enforce the cap. Once you have been capped, your DHCP lease will automatically expire, and you will be allocated an IP in a capped range.
It seems however that most people have their IP change on every disconnect. The only likely explanation I can offer for this is that they are running Windows. Because Windows doesn't comply with or confirm to any standard, it's more than likely that Windows machines think they have to get a new lease every time they reconnect.
This will cause Telkom's disconnection to act as a forced reset. It is also extremely annoying if you run a DHCP server with Windows on your network, as some older Windows machines even seem to take out the new lease without cancelling the old, meaning you have unused IPs that are unavailable to other users.
I agree that Telkom should be offering the service. I would certainly have a use for it, I absolutely hate having to get my mail with fetchmail, but we probably won't see that happening unless we all write to ICASA, I am just too lazy for that battle.
Telkom will, of course, offer the excuse that it is not technically possible for them to offer a static IP address. This is because of they way they implement the cap. They do not use propper traffic shaping to implement the cap, instead, they route you over an extremely slow and congested international connection.
To achieve this effect, they must force you into an IP range that is routed through the slow connection.
The bulk of their excuse to ICASA will state that they can not provide static IP service because this would effectively prevent them from implementing the cap.
That is not correct, naturally, as they could just as easily implement the cap by having a cron job add traffic shaping rules for offending IP addresses to some piece of routing or shaping equipment automatically.
That's really hard though, seeing as Telkom's "highly trained Cisco and UNIX engineers" don't know how to write even the most basic shell scripts... [
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John,
I've heard about this business from two seperate sources. The first person is part of a consortium attempting to set up a (legal) wireless ISP for rural areas in the Free State. To serve internet connections to farms, small town schools, etc. Of course, the person who told me about this was very reluctant to give me any details at all, not even contact numbers.
The second is *MUCH* more intriguing. A small ISP I used to do remote admin work for in the past have been providing wireless access service "illegally" for some time now.
Another ISP in the same town have been doing the same thing for almost as long, and a third ISP recently jumped in, also trying to compete for the same small market.
Recently, the ISP I had contact with were approached by a representative from ICASA about their "alleged unlicensed use of the ISM band."
They co-operated with this person and allowed him to milk them for information. It appears that they were reported to ICASA by one of their competitors, but that ICASA are somehow aware (or bluffing) that the competitors are also using the ISM band.
From what I can understand from the information given to me, it appears they may have struck some sort of deal where by they are allowed to apply for an ISM band license for one frequency channel, and in exchange, will point out to ICASA investigators the frequency channels and locations of base stations in use by their competitors.
The whole thing seems quite skull-duggerous to me to be quite honest. It almost seems as if ICASA are handing out licenses exclusively to those willing to rat out their compettition. That's dangerous.
Of course, this is all second hand information, and I can't state any of this authoritatively. If any of this is accurate though, I think we should all be supremely worried about the state of our regulator. [8)]
Will
Willie Viljoen
Web Developer
Adaptive Web Development
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