iBursting on to the scene

Johannesburg, 09 Mar 2005

Only the strong will be able to resist the pleasures of 1Mbps Internet connectivity delivered by the iBurst solution from Wireless Business Solutions (WBS).

<B>iBurst</B>

Price: R599 per month excluding UT on 30-day notice contract.
R699 per month including UT-D on 24-month contract.
R679 per month including UT-C on 24-month contract.
Discounted price: R454 per month for the duration of the soft launch (until end March 2005).
User terminal options: UT-C R2 100 (this is a PCMCIA device)
UT-D R2 800 (this is a desktop device with USB and Ethernet port)
Activation fee: Once-off fee of R456 per UT on a 24-month contract.
Once-off fee of R114 per UT on a month-to-month contract.

Offering its customers the option of a month-to-month sign up, WBS gives the public more room to test other products. One downfall with this package is that you will need to purchase the user terminal unit at a price ranging from R2 100 for notebooks and R2 800 for the desktop.

As the service becomes more widely used and more users sign up, added services and more custom packages will be implemented.

WBS plans to expand its coverage, introduce anti-spam and anti-virus on incoming e-mail, application shaping and prioritisation, pay-per-use bandwidth (this will be needed once the user has reached the 3GB limit), and voice over Internet Protocol.

Although the cap is not in effect at the moment, it will come into play within the next two months.

Having tested the iBurst on several systems, using a variety of port configurations, it is clear the solution is aimed at speeding up common applications like e-mail, browsing, FTP, streaming, virtual private networking and remote desktop applications. All other applications are allocated a connection speed of 64Kbps.

Users may experience slower connection rates under certain conditions. For example, I experienced some signal degradation when it was cloudy.

While most Asian and some European countries have ADSL broadband Internet access that is cheap, fast and has no bandwidth cap, it appears local consumers will have to be content with higher costs and a limited bandwidth cap of 3GB for the time being.

However, indications are that iBurst will continue to deliver continuous, relatively problem-free wireless Internet, despite the constraints of the local telecoms industry.

Coverage:

Johannesburg:

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Pretoria:

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Cape Town:

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Durban:

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iBursting on to the scene

Only the strong will be able to resist the pleasures of 1Mbps Internet connectivity delivered by the iBurst solution from Wireless Business Solutions.