Tag: Internet

Orange Mauritius Launches 100Mbps FTTH Connection

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Inf

That’s it folks! The small island of Mauritius now has 100Mbps Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) available, courtesy of Orange Mauritius while there are other options for business, as you can see in this business broadband deals online. Just in case you missed all the advertising billboards, newspapers and everywhere else. Get high speed internet for your home and business when you contact local internet providers. amazon queen bed sheets

Orange MU 100Mbps FTTH

Granted, it still costs a lot at Rs. 3999 / month, but hey, it’s a start in comparing us with the likes of Europe and South Korea! You get 100Mbps upload and 20Mbps download. If you need an internet connection that’s faster than this, then you should consider switching to a software defined WAN.

Regarding the FUP, if I understood the 100Mbps FAQ correctly, the connection should be unlimited subject to a fair usage policy (FUP) applied but no speed decreases like the 10/20/30 Mbps FTTH offers. This remains to be confirmed though. Drop me a comment if you got more information regarding this, thanks! If you want other options for internet providers, visit www.EATEL.com/residential/internet/ and see if they can service your area, and if you have a business learning about employee incentive programs can be useful to keep your business productive.

Congratulations to Orange for the launch and for bringing Mauritius closer to being a real “cyber island”. They also took the opportunity to re-brand their visual identity and logo, which looks quite nice and colourful now:

MyT New Logo 2016

P.s. Do check out the User Guide. It’s quite informative.

CanalSat Maurice Launches CanalBox

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Inf

CanalSat Mauritius has launched its Internet service, known as CanalBox today. The service is a combination of its existing TV offers together with the Internet service, AirBox, that Emtel has recently started offering.

In this article, you’ll find out how the CanalBox compares with the Standalone AirBox offer of Emtel. No comparison with other ISPs etc as you can find this in my previous article on AirBox. The Mauritian Internet market is getting more crowdy!

Without further delays, here it is:

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Emtel Launches Airbox

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Inf

Emtel is keeping up with innovation and has recently launched Airbox, a high-speed best-effort broadband service, or what the company calls “Fiber Through The Air” (FTTA).

The service comes at the time when Orange is quickly trying to cover the whole island with fiber and Bharat Telecom is trying to do the same thing to the central regions of Mauritius only.

Emtel is the last in and is hoping to be the first out with the most customers with their new service. The race to high-speed Internet for home users has truly begun…

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Orange Mauritius Announces Price Cuts, Speed Boosts

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Inf

Orange (and Mauritius Telecom), have just announced our Christmas gift for the year 2010: ADSL users can expect a reduction in prices and MyT users will see their current speed doubled. The changes will start taking effect as from 1st December 2010.


Update 0: I put this as Update Zero because it’s most important: MyT Users with NO TV option will get neither speed boost NOR price cut, as confirmed on TheMediaGuru’s comment section. You will have to pay Rs. 999 (Rs. 151 extra!) if you want more speed.

Update 1: According to the user “Sab” on TheMediaGuru’s article (see link below), there won’t be any speed boosts for ADSL users, only the Rs. 100 reduction in prices.

Update 2: The price decrease / speed boosting is not pleasing everybody. There are some complaints coming from Jeyen Chellum and ACIM that Orange has done something weird or how it was ICTA’s role to announce the price cuts. I’ll admit, I didn’t understand what the problem was myself. Moreover, commenters on the L’Express article would prefer a price-cut over a speed boost. I personally prefer a speed boost over a price cut. I am opening a poll for you to answer this question.

[poll id=”2″]

Update 3: FUP no longer applies to MyT. Not that it was ever applied…

Update 4: You may be interested in this article too…


Here is a summary of the changes for ADSL (All prices are Vat Inclusive):

  • ADSL Home 256 Kbps(3GB Cap Limit): Rs. 499 → Rs. 399
  • ADSL Home 512 Kbps: Rs. 848 → Rs. 759
  • ADSL 128 Kbps for Rodrigues: Rs. 499 → Rs. 399
  • ADSL Business package prices fall by 10%. New prices will probably be:
    • ADSL Business 256 Kbps: Rs. 1840 → Rs. 1656
    • ADSL Business 512 Kbps: Rs. 2875 → Rs. 2587.50
    • ADSL Business 1 Mbps: Rs. 5750 → Rs. 5175
    • ADSL Business 2 Mbps: Rs. 10235 → Rs. 9211
  • Dedicated Lines fall by 24%

MyT prices remain unchanged, but the speed doubles:

  • MyT 512 Kbps → MyT 1 Mbps
  • MyT 1 Mbps → MyT 2Mbps
  • MyT 2Mbps → MyT 4Mbps (!!)

MyT will also offer 3 new channels – Boing, MCM Top and Motor TV and add more titles to its Video on Demand service.

There is no word yet on whether the speed doubling will be applied to existing ADSL users (like me). I hope the Christmas gift comes to us ADSL users too. I’ll update this article as more details surface.

If you have any more information, please do share!

Hat-tip to TheMediaGuru for sharing the initial news.

(Source)

Internet Filtering Being Debated in Cabinet

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Inf

I have recently blogged about the possibility of Internet Filtering being introduced in Mauritius.

I guess this is being confirmed now, with the publication of this piece of news in the local newspapers. Le Mauricien, if I’m not mistaken. For now, I think it’ll only be filtering out pr0n. No word on whether it filters everything by default, or whether you need to opt-in, or if there is an opt-out clause, or whether you need to install some client. Nothing.

Let’s wait and see. I fear that, it starts with protecting children, and ends with censoring websites the government or other powerful lobbies don’t like. Even legitimate websites with good-intent.

I still stand by my view that education is still the best way to inform children about the dangers on the Internet. So they may in turn educate their friends, and children afterward. Censoring the content is just denying the truth. Or, implement local censoring. This task is left to parents. ISPs could provide filtering software whenever there is a new customer registration, and inform the parents about how to install the software (or install it as part of customer support).

What are your views, dear readers?

Music Recognition Service Roundup

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Inf

I just saw the stats of Geekscribes and the article about the music recognition software Tunatic is leading in the number of views. Seeing how people are interested in such services, I decided to dedicate a post about other services of the same type that do work from a computer or are online services. Let’s start:

Update (05.08.10): Added Audiggle (#5)

1. Tunatic

I have already talked at length on this software now. Download and install it, plug in a microphone, record a piece of your unknown track via Tunatic and it’ll probably give you the track name and artist if they are in the database. The problem with Tunatic is that development seems to have stopped, as it can be seen from this line on Tunalyzer’s page: “NB: Tunalyzer should be available for the Windows platform in early 2007.”. Tunalyzer allows you to analyze your own known songs, and have them added to the Tunatic database.

It works for most songs I tested it on, but since development seems to have stopped, I don’t have much hope for the project getting new features.

Read the post about Tunatic on Geekscribes

2. Midomi

This one is a new service I’ve just discovered, but which I don’t use as it was meant to. Basically, it’s an online service where you go, and hum/sing some track you don’t know the details of. Maybe it’s a tune stuck in your head somewhere and you’d like the name. There’s a bar near the top part. So you click on it, hum the song in your microphone and it’ll almost certainly give you the track’s details. It worked for all tracks I tested, even some lesser-known tracks which surprised me. It’s also very fast in its identification.

Read the post about Midomi on Geekscribes

3. Audiotag

This service takes a different approach from the above two. Instead of recording a tune, you need to upload the track or some part of it to the service. You can use a variety of tools to do cut an MP3 track, for example, Mp3DirectCut which is free. After uploading the piece, which should be around 10-15 seconds minimum, it’ll give you the details you want.

I have not tested the service a lot since I would need to do a lot of cutting tracks. But I tested with two tracks, and both were recognized. One was fairly known, the other less-known with almost no lyrics.

Also, there are those facts mentioned in the footer: “recognized queries: 83453; DB size: 1327721 tracks, 96479 albums; last DB update: 4 days ago; added 23636 tracks, 1833 albums“, so I believe Audiotag is a reliable service.

Audiotag is good for people who do not have microphones, but the compromise is that you must have access to the digital track itself to be able to upload it. It doesn’t work for tunes you’ve heard on the radio or stuck in your mind, but it is good to identify that nice tune you downloaded off some site named “Track-01”. 🙂

4. Picard Tagger via Musicbrainz

Picard is not an identifier per-se. It’s a tagger. You give it access to your unknown tracks locally, and it will tag them (if possible) using data from the audio fingerprint database of  Musicbrainz.

When tested, Picard was able to identify some tracks which didn’t have their tags. However, its use is slightly more complex than the 3 above services. The strength of Picard is that it can do recognition on its own without needing to record or upload things. It’s also cross-platform, providing Windows, OSX and Linux support.

You can download Picard here, and check out the docs of Musicbrainz that teaches you how to use it.

5. Audiggle

That one is relatively new to me. The website is clean and simple, so I hope the program is as nice. I immediately went and put it to test. I immediately noticed the .NET requirement. So much for portability. If you need that, Midomi’s for you. But let’s see Audiggle’s worth. Installation was a breeze. First thing, I had to set my Microphone. Problem is I have two Line-Ins for microphone, both listed as “Microphone” so I have no idea about which is which. A note about which microphone belongs to which sound-card would be nice.

Next… What? Registration? What the hell? This is an immediate turnoff for me. Why do I need to register to identify a track. Ok, maybe to track all my identified tracks. Lol. Ok let’s go through this pain. Fortunately, registration is quite fast. Okayyy. First try. Login… “Audiggle is down for maintenance.” Nothing on the website indicates this though. Alright, after 5 mins of retries, it’s still failing.

Guess it’s not ready for the lime-light yet. I’ll come back to it later. If you have more success than me, do leave a comment please!

Do you know a similar service, but which is not mentioned here? Please post it in the comments below!

P.s. There are many other recognition services not mentioned in this roundup. This is because most of them either require a mobile phone or mobile device of some kind (Shazam) or they require you to type notes on virtual keyboards (MusicPedia). These are not really intuitive to use in my opinion, so I shared only the most user-friendly and accessible-to-all services.