It's our birthday month! Cape Connect is 18 years old and still going strong.

Keep an eye on our Facebook and Instagram for this month's special offers for new clients. Watch our WhatsApp channel for a pop-up spot prize or two for our current clients.

Ask Me Anything Day

Find our team in the Macassar Heights area TODAY - ask them anything! Look for our gazebo, table and banners.

Sign up Bonus

A reminder of our referral programme, where you automatically receive R150 off your subs invoice for every successful client you refer to Cape Connect Internet - and they do too!

We've made this a bit easier:

• Open your Cape Connect client app or your portal page
• Scroll down to Refer and Earn on the front page, then click on Invite.

• Fill in the details of the person you wish to refer.
• They will receive an email with a link to apply for a free service availability check, and a referral code that links back to your profile on our system.
• They enter the code, we sort out their internet, and once they are active you both receive your bonus!

The more you refer, the more you earn. Simple as that.

Tech Talk

Do you know where your internet comes from?

No - "the wifi" is not the right answer.

You may have heard one of our staff say "The Internet is a network of networks", and that is the absolute truth. Your internet doesn't just come from one place.

All the websites, the streaming servers, the social media, the work sites, the email services - EVERYTHING - is connected across the world, usually by undersea cables (here's a fantastic current map of where they all are). And yes, your internet can be munched by a shark, trawled up by a dragging ships anchor or blown up by terrorists if your service provider is only buying service on one of these cables. But there are very few service providers who don't have a connection to at least one backup link under the sea. If one cable is broken, your internet traffic moves onto another one.

So here's a practical example of how this works:

Let's say you are one of our wireless clients in Somerset West. You have an antenna on your roof, and a wireless router in your house. You want to watch a YouTube video on your phone.

• Your phone connects to your home wifi signal, which your router broadcasts.
• The router has a cable connecting it to the antenna on your roof. (This cable also provides power to the antenna)
• The antenna connects over the air back to a broadcast antenna on one of our our towers - which has a cable going into a large management router on that site.
• From that router we have a fibre connection to a central system on our network, and another fibre connection from there to our network cabinet in the Teraco data centre, Rondebosch.
• Teraco has hundreds of cabinets that all connect to each other for various ISPs, services, file storage etc. They also connect to their sister sites in Joburg and other cities via fibre, to other data centres, and to the main incoming undersea cable in Yzerfontein.
• Also in Teraco, Google has a local mirror server for YouTube, Gmail and other services that saves information requested a lot - so when your phone says "I want to watch a cat video", the request goes looking for that video on their local servers in South Africa. If it has been watched in South Africa, there's likely a copy lurking there that they can send you via a very short quick route. (This is why we peer with as many content providers as we can to provide you with the quickest route for info available, directly between our network and theirs)
• If your video is not there, the request then goes through the various undersea cables to go find it on one of the overseas servers - which transfers all that info back along all these routes and voila! a cat video appears on your phone.

Cat video not loading? There could be a problem anywhere on this massive network of connections between your phone and where that video is saved somewhere on the internet.

Cat video slow? Maybe it's not stored in South Africa, and that delay is information moving at the fastest possible speed across all those routes to reach you, delayed only slightly by a hungry shark chewing on a cable.

From the Archives

Internet provision is not an office job. A good portion of my working day for many years was spent in ceilings, on ladders, 4x4-ing up mountains and clinging to very tall towers such as the one pictured here.

All our technicians (and most managers) hold work at height certifications for a very good reason.

On this particular day we had quite a lot of work to do installing and aiming antennas, neatening up cables, removing the previous tower occupants old cables etc. We came armed with walkie-talkies so no-one had to shout from the tower to the ground, long ropes, pulleys to move equipment up and down the tower, climbing gear, backpacks with everything you might need while up there (plus spares in case you dropped a cable tie...) - and we packed in snacks.

A couple hours in and breakfast was rapidly starting to wear off. The bloke on the ground radioed up to find out what there was to eat, I radioed back "there are some Bar-Ones in the back of the truck". We'd forgotten how far walkie-talkie comms could reach... because back on the radio came a stranger's voice from some security control room within range of that signal, saying "thank you, I'll have a Bar-One too!".

Shot of the month

We're often out on site at very odd hours and in very strange places - but this means we get some awesome views. Here's this month's picture perfect shot.

Michelle Bainbridge

Chief Internet Artisan

Cape Connect Internet (Pty) Ltd

Read Past Newsletters