Blog

RSAWEB is moving its Cape Town office today (Thursday 13 March) and Tomorrow (Friday 14 March). All office based staff and equipment will be moving to smart new offices in the Avalon Building in Hope Street, Cape Town. Our Datacenter will remain unaffected, so don’t worry no servers will be moved over this period. Unfortunately our Telkom lines will be moving tomorrow, so please bear with us as Telkom attend to this. For urgent support during this time, please continue to log support requests on MYRSAWEB, or email support at rsaweb.co.za.

Team RSAWEB has notched up another convincing win, this time in the action cricket arena.

Batting first, the challengers, Quirk eMarketing, posted 51 runs after suffering a major collapse in their middle oder. RSAWEB followed up with a clinical 119, and explosive batting performance by Russel Gordon, scoring 27 off just 11 balls.

Special thanks to Quirk for organizing the event.

Find out more about how Team RSAWEB sponsors the real heroes of sports: those who compete with the fervor of professional athletes, but still maintain a full time ‘day job’.

ADSL in South Africa has been around since 2003 but uptake by consumers and business was really spurred when the download speed was increased to “up to 4Mbps”. This download speed represented a huge improvement on the 1Mbps product previously available. ADSL was more useful and more applications that required this type of bandwidth encouraged sales along with larger investment in infrastructure roll out by ISP’s and Telkom. Although the download speed was 4Mbps, the upload speed was limited to 384kbps. This is about to change with Telkom conducting trials in March were they have upgraded the upload speed of the 4Mbps product to 640Kbps.

This upload speed increase looks imminent and could be rolled out as soon as April, should the limited trial prove successful in March. This opens the door of opportunity for applications such as VOIP and VPN’s that require syncronised upload and download speeds, and effectively doubles the amount of bandwidth available for these types of services.

ADSL 1Mbps = 384Kbps upload. (Current)
to
ADSL 1Mbps = 640Kbps upload. (Future)

Recently we at RSAWEB HQ were on the receiving end of Eskom’s load shedding and noticed something interesting in the building we occupy. While we have a backup UPS and Generator, and were working happily, none of the other tenants in our Building could work! That means about 1000 people just in our immediate surroundings were twiddling their thumbs for 2 hours. This got me thinking, now that power cuts are part and parcel of doing business in South Africa, how many businesses are re-evaluating their server, data and employee power requirements?

We have been inundated with requests for customized backup solutions and power alternatives, so I thought I would share a business scenario that could help solve the problem and possibly reduce overheads and costs in the process. Lets take a small insurance company with 50 employees and 3 servers all located in one office. Traditionally they would have installed some form of connectivity to the office and built a small server room on site. Now faced with power cuts, how do they invest wisely in order to sustain their business and minimize downtime.

Firstly, they could outsourced their server hosting and management to RSAWEB. This would mean that their servers and data would always be accessible and they need not spend money on expensive generator and UPS solutions. They also now benefit from having their servers accessible at high speed from anywhere over a secure VPN. They no longer need the on site server room, and can now just focus on their employees at the office and their immediate needs. They then install good connectivity to our data center in order for people in the office to work normally, and will be able to accommodate more off site workers who could work with a laptop and a 3G card. Desktop PC’s however still are not safe from blackouts, and there is an increasing trend to systematically upgrade to laptops with longer battery life. The usefulness of a laptop in South Africa is strangely linked to its 3-5 hour battery life, whereas anywhere else in the world it is for mobility reasons that laptops are primarily used.

Increasingly the risk of on site equipment from a security and power perspective as well as the huge initial capital expenditure required needs to be evaluated, when compared to renting equipment and services from ISP’s, who have already invested in power and security infrastructure on a large scale.

Its Alive! We are extremely proud to unveil our new branding and corporate image. The new RSAWEB logo and slogan “Technology meets Life” was unveiled along with the new website at our glittering end of year function, held at the BMW Pavilion in the V & A Waterfront on Friday night. The new website that we feel better promotes our hosting and broadband products includes online ordering for all products, and is far more informative than the old website. The old website that has served us well for the past 3 years has been completely replaced with a dynamic website that stays true to one of our brand values, that is “Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication”. Let us know what you think, we look forward to hearing from you, and don’t forget to enter our iPod Touch giveaway competition.

Cape Town went Springbok mad today, showing the true spirit of Capetonians. With schools though out the city and surrounding areas closing early thousands of fans lined the streets and greeted the Springboks home after their historic World Cup Win in France 2 weeks ago. It was amazing to see the people going mad in the streets and how appreciative the national team was of their supporters. The open top bus left City Hall at 11:30 this morning and by the time I had hopped on a scooter and navigated the chaotic streets ‘The Big green England Squashing Machine’ had already made the turn from Adderley into Strand Street. The entire city was blocked off to traffic and people left the comfort of their air conditioned offices to go scream and shout at their rugby hero’s. Shosholoza rang out amongst Vuvuzela blasts and every so often a “Jake for President” could be heard. After touring the city streets the Bok’s made their way to Newlands Rugby ground where 50 000 well wishers packed into the stadium. On days like these, its great to be South African. Well done Bokke!