Randolph So you will have noticed I've been quiet the past few days. We moved house last Thursday, and what with all the preparations and such, not to mention the lack of a Sentech signal at the new place, well the blog has had to wait.
The new house is on the ground floor (hence the "moving down" in the topic). I've been living on the first floor for the past seven months, and before that, my house was a double-storey, and prior to that, I was on the second floor of another apartment building.
So now we're on the ground floor, in a complex that is the equivalent of four levels high. Small wonder there is no Sentech signal. Well, there is, but not on our level.
So I made some calls, and arranged on Friday to have someone come out to test for iBurst, after 6pm when I got home. I instructed him to bring an iBurst router. My theory was that if iBurst could find its way into my house without the necessity of an external antenna, I would sign up immediately and cancel my Sentech subscription (Sentech does not have a good customer care attitude).
Friday evening, friends came around, and we waited for this guy. And waited. And waited. Eventually, just before 10pm, he called to say that he was still at a customer, so he would be a little while, but would come through. I told him to make it 1pm the following day (Saturday).
At 3:30pm on Saturday, he finally arrived (wasting two hours of my time waiting for him, and after several telephonic threats of finding someone else). Ironically, it seems that everyone knows everyone else in this industry, and somehow they all work for the same company. Monopoly, anyone? I thought Telkom was bad.
In any event, he arrived, sans iBurst router, but with a pet monkey in his bag. I am not making this up (apologies to Dave Barry). He told me that I would not receive a signal anyway, judging by the layout of the complex (with no equipment to test, mind you), and when I asked him to humour me anyway, he didn't even have a PCMCIA router to plug into my laptop.
By this time I was frustrated. I asked about something called a "high gain" antenna for my Sentech connection, and he said the line would be too long from the aerial to the Sentech router, resulting in loss of bandwidth. I call this "attenuation", and neither I nor Marinus was convinced. He assured us that he would make a plan to deliver an iBurst router the following day (Sunday), so that we could actually test the signal – this after I had already on the Friday asked for that in the first place!
Sunday rolled around, we went grocery shopping (I hate grocery shopping), and bought a TV stand which we built last night – it's really pretty! – and Marinus saw a Sentech agent in the shopping centre. He arranged a meeting with the guy there to come around after his shift, and at 2:30pm on the dot, he arrived.
He tested the Sentech signal and made the same observation we did about needing to have an aerial higher up. He then tested iBurst and found a signal inside the house, although it was a little unstable. By unstable, I mean that the line speed couldn't make up its mind to be 1Mbps or 684Kbps. Incidentally, iBurst runs at a maximum of 1Mbps. He said it needed an external antenna to run stable. I said no.
So, John answered all our questions, and suggested sticking in a high-gain antenna, running a cable of around 5 metres to the Sentech router through the window, and that it would be done this afternoon.
So why was monkey-boy unable to tell me the same thing? And why are we still waiting for him to call us about Sunday?