Forest Fibre

I thought the bright blue cable running from tree to tree along my back fence was probably the internet fibre cable; Turns out it is indeed, though the local vervets know it as a convenient safe highway well above marauding dogs and hopefully, cruel shooting humans, bastids.

Yesterday the Telkom techie came to connect us. AT LAST! shouted Jessie, the two to three weeks we’ve waited had taken forEVAH! and she nearly died!

So now we’re connected to the world, which is only right for citizens of Mtunzini, as three sea cables land here: SAFE linking South Africa, Mauritius, La Réunion, India and Malaysia, and EASSy, linking Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Comoros, Madagascar, Mozambique and South Africa, (both Telkom) and SEACOM, between Eastern and Southern Africa and linking to Europe and Asia (Liquid Telecom Neotel).

“We” spliced the cable, found the tiny thin glass fibre inside all the protective layers, and annealed it with this cool piece of kit. And Voila! we got fibre! OK, so actually Patrick from Telkom did it all.

There’s the router top left in the picture of our lounge/kitchen. We’ve been limping along with 0kb to 4Mb intermittent data rate. Now we have a steady:

Update: Well, not so steady. It’s still Telkom, so we now vary between 0KB and 20MB. They drop the ball quite often, forcing techies out at night and weekends to repair the damage at overtime rates …