My Wireless – April 19, 2004

Hello, good morning and welcome to Cybersurf – your weekly window on the world wide web – I am your Cyberhost - Steven Lang.
This weekend I have been totally and utterly absorbed surfing the web. This is not in itself terribly unusual, since every weekend I try to surf as much as possible – but this weekend I had extra incentive.

I was given a mywireless modem and laptop to test. The modem is a sentech product and if you would like to find out more about it, you can go directly to the sentech.co.za web site for more details – but in the meantime – let me share my experience with you.

The modem looks like a bulky PDA with a flip up antena – it could also look like a fat cellphone and you also need to charge it ocassionaly like a cellphone.
The signal strength indicator also reminds one of a cellphone – it has four red lights that indicate signal strength – four means you are rocking on maximum broadband; three for slightly less; two means your signal is still very usable and one means you’re about to lose a shaky connection.

The mywireless modem does need one cable to connect to the lap top via USB ports, but it does not physically connect to anything else – especially, and very definitely not to a phone wire.

The beauty of wireless is that it works anywhere – I was not confined to my study, I could surf in the lounge or in the garden, I could surf in a coffee shop, I could take it to a friends house and show off the test equipment.
If I was sure that some idiot wouldn’t shoot me and steal the modem, I could even take to a public park. Since the signal covers most of Johannesburg, you can take it just about anywhere.

Secondly – the connection is always on – this means that costs are not dependent on usage – you can down load stuff all day every day and not have to worry about your phone bill – and because it doesn’t use a phone line, you and your family can still use the phone to talk on – I belive some people use it for that.

It get’s better still – download speed is extremely fast – it is after all broadband. I was not able to test how fast – but Sentech offers three speeds – 128, 256 and 512 KBPS – I suspect I was testing the lower end version, but the was certainly much faster than my normal 56 k modem at home – and even faster than my connection speed on the SABC’s network.

I have tested the mywireless modem and seen that it really works and works very well – there is however a downside, as you might have guessed – the price. At R650 per month for the entry level modem, it is cheaper than ADSL; more expensive than ISDN – but quite frankly too expensive for most people. A business person could probaby justify the cost, but for normal people who just love using the web R650 is too much.

Sentech also requires you to sign a 24 month contract – in my view that is too long in an environment where technolgy is changing all the time. My wireless is great this week – but who knows what is going to happen nhext week.

That’s it for today, have to go back to my testing you know – don’t forget to tune in next Monday for more Cybersurf.