Marching right on with 2025, can you believe we're already hitting Autumn?

And as cooler weather approaches, Eskom is gearing up with their next round of power outages. For our home fibre users, we offer a mini UPS rental that will keep your router and ONU online during loadshedding. For our wireless, Heatzone and more intensive electronics users, our support team is available to advise on a solution that will keep your services and devices powered up in the dark.

A reminder that the AJAX security equipment we supply runs on backup battery power that lasts on average 2 years per device - making sure those thieves in the night are spotted immediately and dealt with, loadshedding or not.

Meet the Team

Jason is one of the original members of the Cape Connect team and has been with us since day one. He has built much of our network with literal blood, sweat and tears, starting his career in this company at the tender age of 14 as an apprentice.

Born and raised in Somerset West he has recently started enjoying exploring the rest of the country - from Karoo to coast to bushveld - and is always up for a road trip.

He enjoys gaming, reading, building model kits and exploring nature in his spare time. Part of exploring nature has been an increasing skill in wildlife photography, honed with regular visits to the Kruger National Park. He has an affinity for digital art and his company site experience means he can spot a dodgy electrical wiring job at a thousand paces.

As a kid he wanted to be a paleontologist or an archeologist, as he has always been fascinated by the ancient world. The best we have been able to offer him is the contents of a couple of fibre trenches though... more on that further down this newsletter.

Tech Talk

You may have heard us state "we peer extensively". What does that mean?

First some terminology. Peering is a direct connection between networks. Our main peering connections are with CDNs - Content Delivery Networks such as Netflix, Akamai, Cloudflare, Amazon, Google, Azure, fastly and China Telecom.

Our secondary peering connections are with other competitive ISPs to ensure traffic flows smoothly between our networks. We peer directly with all South African ISPs and most Namibia, Swazi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe ISPs, except for Telkom - who still have very restrictive policies and pass traffic to us via Portugal.

In practical terms: We have network cabinets in data centres in Cape Town and Johannesburg, and from our cabinets direct fibre connections run to the cabinets of those CDNs. This is known as bilateral peering. They mirror information locally that is also stored overseas. Your connection to one of these networks and its content is fast. Very fast. Your router is mainlining straight into their network and onto their servers. Instead of your browser trying to find what you're looking for overseas, it zips along our peering links and finds it right here.

If however you are using a VPN that bypasses our peering network, this could lead to delays with information delivery. Instead of using that blisteringly fast connection we've provided, your VPN is trying to find the back roads to an overseas server, with associated delays.

We have many, many years of peering experience. With hundreds of peering links at local internet exchanges such as NAPAfrica, CINX and JINX, our network has been set up to deliver content to you at the fastest possible rate.

From the Archives

What can you fit in a Renault Trafic? Around a ton and a half of old computers, most of a high site tower, at least two motorbikes, or an entire lounge suite .

But what about a ditch digging trenching machine?

Yup, you can fit that in too - barely.

In 2015 we needed to install fibre in a rural area, with a very long trench between our first and second points. This is not something you do by hand with picks and shovels - so a trencher was hired, loaded and off to site it went with Jason tasked to run it until the trench was done.

That trench took 7 days of machine digging - through valleys, up steep inclines, between vineyards, over at least one earth dam wall, at all times being careful not to tip the massive beast over, break any of the teeth on hidden rocks, hit anything important like farm irrigation systems, get bogged down in damp soggy ground or attacked by bees, and making sure the trench was dug to regulation depth. It was not a pleasant job - and it was only the start of the process.

Once the trench was dug, we hooked an 8km reel of fibre on our special "chariot" behind the Land Rover, grabbed a couple of guys with spades to close up as we went, and started rolling.

Rolling and closing took two days - we were left with mere metres of fibre on the roll by the time we pulled in to our destination.

Prior to trenching, we had built out both ends of this link - site prep, concrete slabs, pipework, network cabinets, power installed, security sorted, everything needed to loop in the fibre, splice it in place and light it up. A quick insight into the process is on our YouTube channel here.

It remains one of the longest single fibre runs we have done by hand in virgin soil with no prior infrastructure, one of the most difficult and labour-intensive.

Competition

Congratulations to Trevor B, who won our R500 Bonsai Tree voucher in February!

Keep an eye on our WhatsApp channel this month for a "fastest fingers first" spot competition.

Business owners - if you would like one of your products featured in an upcoming give-away, please contact me via hello@cape-connect.com. We'd love to support you.

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. Friday night entertainment - all hands on deck helping a mountain slope and towers NOT burn down this time...

See you on 1 April!

Michelle Bainbridge

Chief Internet Artisan

Cape Connect Internet (Pty) Ltd