Archive for 'IT'
Orange’s Capping Policy hit L’Express Newspaper
September 11, 2008 by InF, under IT, Mauritius.
… and people are not happy! If you want a snapshot of the page, here goes: (Sorry for the quality. I’ve got no scanner)
(L’Express of Wednesday 10th September 2008, Page 7)
This article talks about a number of interesting points worth mentioning. It seems that a number of users are not aware that capping policies were put in place, and continued downloading as they used to without caring for a limit. And now, Orange is surprising them by saying “Hey! You downloaded too much dude! You will be capped!”.
Personally, I don’t know anybody who got a warning for over-downloading (yet). We know there are capping policies, but I didn’t hear of anybody getting a letter or call, or anything like that to inform them of going over the cap limits.
Next, it seems ACIM (Association des Consommateurs de Maurice - I think) is not very pleased with Orange’s practices, reporting that even if Orange applied their capping in other countries, it should not do so here since there is hardly any competition in the ISP (Internet Service Provider) sector. Abroad, if you are not satisfied with your ISP, you can choose from a dozen others, while here, you are stuck with two or three, like Nomad, DCL and Emtel if you can afford the modem. Azu of MTML is not on par yet, with lowly cap limits of 1GB I think.
ACIM giving the matter focus is a good thing for us all, even if you are not a heavy user. What is heavy usage anyways? Orange says [2000 MP3s or 14 Movies] for ADSL 128K Home and [3000 MP3s or 28 movies] for ADSL 512K Home per month.
Seriously, is this how you measure bandwidth usage? In terms of MP3s or movies? It’s like measuring the speed of an airplane by how many clouds go by in 1 hour! Please, just tell us what is the real cap! Just tell us plainly “You are allowed x GB of bandwidth per month”!
Things like MP3s and Movies have varying sizes. I can say an MP3 has an average size of 5MB and I’m being conservative. A movie, assuming a DVDRIP is 700MB. Notice that no format is given. What is the movie encoded in? AVI? MKV? The size would greatly vary, almost in a 1:2 ratio! Ok, so I assume 700MB, then I estimate the cap to be around 9800MB or 10GB for 128K and 20GB for 512K? We are not told!
And what’s with the idea of telling people they can “download movies” and “download MP3s”? Is that some kind of condoning of piracy? What I read here is this: “Pirate a bit, but not too much, else your speed goes down”!
Another issue: we are not told by how much our speed decreases. What if my speed goes down from say, 512K to 128K if I go over the cap? That’s 4x less than what I’d be paying for! Plain unfair!
And finally, in countries where caps are implemented, there is the concept of peak time and off-peak time. Caps are only implemented during peak time, and you can leech to your heart’s content off-peak. That is, if ever you find your speed reduced because you went over-cap, then the reduction only applies during peak hour, and the limits are lifted off-peak. This is a good idea, if ever caps are to be implemented. And duh, anyways, the caps abroad are > 200GB! Consider Comcast’s 250GB limit, compared to our paltry 20GB. And we don’t even come close to Comcast’s speed packages, so it’s definitely not worth comparing us with them.
On this, I leave you to your conclusions and comments… 
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5 Comments
NetPC, Low-cost AMDs, Asus Eee: Which one is best for me?
August 10, 2008 by InF, under Featured, Firefox, IT, Mauritius, Others.
A number of interesting developments occurred in a short time in Mauritius. Of these, the oldest was the introduction of the NetPC by Mauritius Telecom. Recently, the Minister of IT and Communications of Mauritius, Mr. Etienne Sinatambou announced that a deal was made with AMD (yes, the CPU maker) to provide low-cost computers to Mauritius at around Rs.10,000 a machine. Again, not bad.
The NetPC and the AMD initiative as I shall call it are good moves, but they each have their respective advantages and disadvantages, which you will learn in this post. You will also learn that there are other alternatives, which are either cheaper, or offer much more value for money at nearly the same price. Ready? Read on…
5 Comments
Orange UK sees subscribers leave
August 8, 2008 by InF, under IT, Mauritius, Tech News, Tech Posts.
The Register has an article about Orange UK’s subscribers leaving it for other, more juicy ISP offers. Here’s the article:
Customers are continuing to desert Orange’s ADSL offerings, the firm’s results revealed today.
In the six months to 30 June 44,000 net broadband subscribers quit the firm, leaving it with 1.06 million. Orange said its UK broadband customer base was “levelling off”, but figures released in February showed that just 4,000 net subscribers were lost in the last three months of 2007. On its own numbers, Orange’s decline is accelerating.
Despite the toughening economic conditions, the rest of the big six ISPs have maintained the positive trend in their customer base as the market approaches saturation. Orange has claimed that its failure to capitalise on market growth is a deliberate strategy to allow it to sort out problems with its network.
Revenues for the UK Home Communication Services unit, which also includes fixed line voice telephony, fell 7.7 per cent. Much of the sales slide was due to the industry-wide decline in traditional home telephone usage. The proportion of margin-boosting unbundled ADSL lines rose from 23 per cent last year to 40 per cent, however.
I’m not very surprised though, considering the huge amounts of complaints made by Orange users in Mauritius.
Well, I hope that this “exodus” of subscribers as The Register termed it will influence the folks at Orange MU to offer some better services instead of low speed connections (megabit for the masses is a dream!) and weird capping and monitoring policies.
Comments please?
1 Comment
DCL to introduce Wireless Internet in Mauritius
July 31, 2008 by InF, under IT, Mauritius.
I found this interesting article in Le Mauricien today, and I thought I might share it with you folks, if ever you may have missed it.
As you can read, it’s about DCL (Data Communications Ltd.) introducing a wireless Internet connection here in Mauritius. Nothing surprising here, since you might say that Network Plus’ Nomad is already here.
Even I say the same thing, and we all know that whatever the ads may say, Nomad still has some problems in some regions of Mauritius. Can’t blame them if Mauritius is a mountainous country, and if wireless signals can’t go through mountains so well.
Due to the short length of the article, not much details are provided just yet. It appears to be long-range, but there are no details about the underlying technology, for example whether it’s WiMax or something like that.
What is mentioned is “haut débit” which I hope is better than the 256K and 512K that we currently have now (for users like me, megabit is out of price!). I wouldn’t mind a megabit, wireless connection if it’s fairly priced and uncapped (or high cap).
Another good thing. The creation of DCL Telecoms, so this could probably indicate the coming in of another ISP on the national market. DCL was already there, and it’s just that the company *might* dedicate more efforts to Internet now. This is just my opinion, huh! 
There is not much info now, so let’s wait and see what happens, and if ever the project can survive.
3 Comments
Orange FAQ Updated: More details on FUP?
May 23, 2008 by InF, under IT, Mauritius, News.
It seems I’m always late with catching up the latest news updates! 
Anyways, according to TheMediaGuru, the Orange FAQ, particularly the sections on FUP (Fair Usage Policy) have been updated. They can be accessed here. Bear with me for the long analysis. This will probably be the last FUP article for a while, since I’m kind of tired about writing on the same subject over and over, specially when we are dealing with unreasonable limits, and unfair practices.
3 Comments
Orange FUP in News on Sunday!
May 18, 2008 by InF, under IT, Mauritius, News.
Finally, the issues about FUP have hit the local newspapers! Guru just sent me a scan of the article, and here it is, for you to feast on!
This article brought me out of my temporary blogging hibernation (due to exam), but had to blog on it! I couldn’t resist! I must thank News On Sunday for publishing the article and Yannick Rivet for reading Mauritian blogs, and considering our opinions. At least, we now know that Mauritian bloggers are being taken seriously!
Btw… Congrats CarrotMadMan! Your title (Stab in the back) goes to print! 
Here is Mr. Avinash Meetoo’s heavily commented and discussed post about FUP. I’m really sorry since I forgot mentioning this great article.
10 Comments
Rapidshare.com DOWN in Mauritius only? (Solved)
May 7, 2008 by InF, under IT, Mauritius, Tech News.
This article is now out-dated. Rapidshare is back online in Mauritius, discarding the concept of orange applying Internet Censorship. It was probably a problem with their servers, or a broken thing somewhere.
It’s back to normal now. I can access it and download normally.
I don’t know since when, but it’s impossible for me, an Orange ADSL user, to access rapidshare.com. I can access rapidshare.de though.
Rapidshare.com can be pinged, can be trace-routed, albeit very slowly, but when loading rapidshare.com in a browser, you get a “page loading” thing (progress bar starts filling) then it freezes.
I managed to get 1 download going, but it failed after 7KB downloaded, with a miserable speed of 1.5KBps, which is lame.
This can mean 2 things:
- There are issues with the Rapidshare servers and they are doing some kind of maintenance.
- Access to rapidshare.com has been blocked by the local ISPs, or Orange.
I had a friend using Nomad’s network to try to access rapidshare.com and launch the same download I’ve been trying to get. No result. It was blocked too.
This is not a local DNS issue since I’m using OpenDNS. Trace-route to rapidshare.com works. If there was a blocking, the request would have stopped at the ISP, or maybe they are letting requests go through but block HTTP requests or something similar?
For now, I don’t know. I’m writing this article without having every fact, so take what you read with a pinch of salt. It might be censorship. Or it could be a simple server problem. Still, Rapidshare is unusable on Orange’s network.
Another weird issue. If you try accessing rapidshare.com via a proxy, it works fine. This is making me seriously consider censorship. Nothing confirmed yet. It might be that Orange started blocking access to Rapidshare to prevent heavy downloading or some kind of weird reason. If you want to check, go to YouHide and use it to access rapidshare.com.
However, if there is censorship in place, there will be an all-out war between Orange and Internet users. They are violating the basic philosophy of the Internet, which is the free and unrestricted flow of information. We can accept capping, but we can’t accept being censored and restricted like that.
I agree that Rapidshare has loads of illegal content, but also, loads of totally legal content. That doesn’t mean that it should be totally blocked. This is plain unfair. If there is indeed censorship, we could send an email to rapidshare, telling them that their premium users are being denied service in Mauritius, and we demand a refund? That should get their attention!
The Media Guru also wrote about this problem, so you might give his article a check.
More on this as I get updates… Nothing confirmed yet, remember this!
Ps. Sorry for the lack of articles on GeekScribes. Both Guru and myself are in exam period and will finish by end of May. So, if there are no frequent updates, you now know why.
5 Comments
Orange’s Brochure
April 24, 2008 by InF, under IT, Mauritius.
I dunno how that Orange propaganda brochure (as if there wasn’t enough Orange advertising already) landed at my place, but I thought I’d look through it. And guess what? It lands on GeekScribes! I ain’t got a scanner, so bear with the cam-pic quality! Here’s the cover:
No Comments
Orange is here, your connection suffers!
April 18, 2008 by InF, under IT, Mauritius.
Take that orange fans! :/
The company is here, and as soon as it lands here, it starts changing things. Sometimes for the best, most of the time, for the worse! Read on!
21 Comments
Mauritian Internet: Are We Obsolete?
April 16, 2008 by InF, under IT, Mauritius.
I think it is official now. Orange is here and is nearly taking over Mauritius Telecom (MT). From what I read and heard, Orange will be handling Internet and mobile services. I haven’t heard anything about landlines, but I’m pretty sure this is included. Heck, seeing the massive advertising campaign the MT has put up, they must be very eager to show off their new partner. This tempted me to write a post about our Internet services in Mauritius. I know this has looonggg been discussed, criticized, flamed, approved and disapproved, but hey, we didn’t have a post on that topic yet, so it doesn’t hurt, right?
