..things I write which I kinda know only friends read. Yes, it’s a bit sad, especially when I assume they read these posts.. I skip the “how was your week” stuff in conversations and move along to the “what does it all mean” parts.

• Monday, had lunch at Rhodes Memorial with Jonathan and visited the the Old Cape Town Zoo.
• Turns out Mia had chickenpox over the weekend, at least the worst was over by Tuesday. She’s a tuffy.
• Amobia’s touch rugby team, won 10 - 4 in the final.
• Turns out I’m a hero (implicitly), maybe I’ll get myself a “single dad” tshirt.
• Tuesday, Lions Head. Put on my (mildly gay) long running tights and went for a run along the table mountain cable car road. Had sushi. Watched Get Smart. Nice movie, had a few good laughs.. man, Anne Hathaway is hot.
• Wednesday, Frogfoot office move.
• The VANS self provisioning case was heard in court 29th-31st.
• Watched The Dark Knight. I enjoyed it. It’s a bit more James Bond than Kung Fu like the the previous one was.. and the penthouse was a bit more American Psycho, but I still like Batman Returns. Inspired me to wear my Vivienne Westwood shirt the next day.
• Thursday, Web Africa brand launch at Relish and GeekDinner at De Capo with Cath. Met an interesting tailor who made suits for a number of presidents. Now I know where Fabiani sent my jackets.
• Met Charl and Jade at the GeekDinner. Big thanks to Perdeberg wines for their GeekDinner sponsorship.
• Friday, blogging. Gym.. trust me, newby parents need strong lower backs to keep up with a 2yr olds. Mia. Tea with the ~ex-wife at Manna. We’re working on being friends. Like the Joker said in The Dark Knight.. I was “like a dog chasing a car.. wouldn’t know what to do with it if I finally caught it.”
• Saturday, watched parts of Babe for the 14th time. Stellenbosch Wine Festival with Georg and Mia. Long, busy, crazy day. Bumped into Max.
• I love Vanilla Tea and honey on a laid back Sunday morning.
• Glen Beach for a bit of sunshine and a few photos. Maybe I’ll see you at Fandango for some jazz at 20:00.

Thought for the week..
“the real breakfast of champions is a low information diet”

I missed my usual Sunday night blog post session. Let’s just say there was enough wine around at the time. Mostly been catching up after a busy weekend. Let’s see..

• I finished the Extreme Networks ECDP course. Next is ENA and then most probably ENS in Dubai.
• Worked on the Teraco switch fabric design and commercial agreements (talking turkey).
• Wednesday was an Amobia exco meeting in Stellenbosch.
• Thursday, watched Semi-Pro, Will Farrel is a god.
• Friday to Monday was Mia time. She’s a good partner in crime and a unique alarm clock… luckily she has a weakness for rooibos tea, Melissa’s rusks and Monsters, Inc. In that order.
• Friday afternoon, Mia and I visited Will for his birthday in Somerset West. Mia locked us out of his house for a while.
• Saturday, made Maltabella porridge and watched the rugby. Traveled to Franschoek for the Bastille day festival. Had lunch with WSE, Cath and Parri.
• Visited Haute Cabriere for sundowners, home of Pierre Jourdan. Awesome views. Great cap classique.
• Sunday, gym, swim, snack at Knead, ice cream at Sinn’s, Deer Park play area where we ran into Dorje. Mia says she wants her own blog.
• Had lunch at Greens with Jonathan and Lynnae.
• Sunday night we had a braai with friends in Llandudno. I suck at Scrabble.
• It’s been a challenging few weeks, but I’m lucky to have very supportive friends.
• Cape Town is a nice place to raise children.

On with the week.

I have not been blogging much lately. Go figure. Weekly news summary as usual..

• I entered Amobia in a venture fund competition. Should have some feedback by mid July.
• Added a Crackbook page for Amobia.
• Watched Zeitgeist, 40 Year Old Virgin and Oceans Eleven.
• We had a Frogfoot company photo taken for 2008. Pics at the usual place.
• Completed the Extreme Networks ECSP training course.
• Made a fact sheet for WAPA.
• Walked up Lions Head three times this week. Helps me think.
• I’m getting back into a swimming routine. Helps me think.
• Friday, made a new friend by apologising to an old friend. We avoided each other for the last 3 years.
• Removed two ~nasty blog posts.
• I brewed up Joe’s famous thai green curry on Friday evening. Nice to cook.
• Visited Wellington on Saturday afternoon.
• Anton is in ZA for a week. Had a nice dinner with friends at the Fishmonger followed by drinks at the Akker.
• Saturday and Sunday was Mia time. We watched Babe today. Sweet movie.

Joe’s news items..

• Random quote of the week: “What on earth would a man do with himself if something did not stand in his way?” — H. G. Wells
• Looks like Teraco raised its remaining funding.
• Tuesday, Georg’s home cooked veggie soup and red wine evening.
• Wednesday, downloaded Firefox 3.0 and moved some furniture.
• There seems to be good interest in a Cape Town peering point again. About 11 networks have responded positively so far, including Google.
• Finally found a use for the DMCA. Facebook is pretty quick with removing copyrighted material.
• Thursday, processed some iWeek paperwork. Amobia and Teraco are now Gold sponsors. WAPA will endorse the Thursday morning wireless session and will have a stand in the iWeek exhibition area. If you have not yet registered, go here.. it’s free.
• The Blio PBX passed 100% of the TBR-3 tests including the optional parts. This completes the 4th and final part of the ICASA requirements.
• I attended the 1st Cape Town Pecha Kucha night. The wine was crap. The Moscow Mules were good. The talks were pretty decent.
• Friday and Saturday was Mia time. We went for a swim again. She fell asleep in the car as we drove to go watch some rugby. Mia slept on my chest for most of the game. Not bothered by any of the excitement around her. It really is a magic feeling having her take a nap like that.
• Saturday night was Andy and Georg’s house warming party. Must be Andy’s 6th house warming in two years. All the usual suspects showed up, including my personal shrink, who’s birthday it is today.
• Sunday, had fish and chips at the Waterfront and watched Kung Fu Panda. A fun movie.
• Walked up Lions Head just before sunset and got some panoramic photos of clouds rolling into Camps Bay and Cape Town harbour. Cape Town is Rome.
• I now have a dinner table (again). Guess I’ll have to have a dinner party soon.
• I also have an Ubuntu PC and SIP phone at home now.. all I need is a big LCD screen for movies.

Peace.

News from planet Joe:

• Teraco now has a commitment for 2/3 of required funding
• Entered Amobia in a business idea competition of sorts, should have some feedback by mid July
• Updated the SwimGeek front page
• Friday, went for a walk with Mia on a strawberry farm
• Saturday, gym, swim, food, family, fun and friends
• Sunday, Fathers Day was a complete mess, I was a complete mess
• Ever see people you know are on your Facebook friends list but you can’t remember their names? It’s happened twice now.
• Persuaded the admin of the en_ZA locale settings to use 24:00 time format and make weeks start on Mondays. The power of open source. If a small thing bugs you it can be fixed quickly.
• I’ve taken an interest in peering (internet exchanges) again after the JINX workshop. Busy tinkering with a few ideas.
• Added a Facebook page for Frogfoot
• I registered for this year’s iWeek conference. I’ve been invited to be part of a wireless panel discussion on the Thursday (wireless day).
• Weekend movies:
  • Elf: Good
  • Sex and the City: Not that bad
  • Hot Fuzz: Classic

Have a fun 4 day week. I can see I’ll need to be applying some selective amnesia jedi mind tricks.

Bullet list news from the life of Joe..

• I watched the 4th Indiana Jones movie today. I liked it. George Lucas must have been too busy working on Howard the Duck 2 to have been involved.
• Nu Metro at the Waterfront is pretty lame. Both their self-service ticket machines were broken.. what’s the point of promoting the self help system if you can’t help yourself?
• To the girl at the gym who wears Issey Miyake, please stop, it’s distracting.
• Quote of the week: “Just remember one thing: they rip your heart through your ass”
• We did a site survey for our plan to build a big wifi hotspot in Long Street last week. Always fun climbing around on rooftops.
• Attended the Open Coffee club event at Sinn’s. Hmm.. not sure what to say other than maybe: it seemed a bit “diluted” (not the coffee).
• Mia and I visited the Spier Cheetah Outreach and bird of pray rehabilitation centre. The cheetahs liked Mia, I guess she looked like a nice afternoon snack.
• I think I caught a mild version of Mia’s flu bug, but I’m feeling better again.
• I wrote a short Q&A style article about Amobia for the WAPA website.
• I should be attending the ISPA JINX peering workshop this week.

Have a brave wintery week.

From an email I wrote to an Amobia staff member today.. maybe you find my little story useful..

This reminds me of what our underwater hockey coach used to try drill into us.. kick, turn, kick, pass.

You see, it’s natural to want to pass when you need air.

Most people go: kick, turn, pass,
and not: kick, turn, kick, pass,
the second being a much better strategy and keeps forward momentum.

My point is..
don’t just point out the problem, suggest the solution also.

The wiki can be changed easily, that’s why it’s a wiki. Give it a first shot.

A quick comparison between Amobia’s rate based last mile links and Telkom Diginet leased lines.

Here we have a list of common line speeds. Telkom Diginet pricing is based on links to the same exchange (cheapest possible). Amobia pricing is worked out for the common scenario where a client wants to connect to their ISP of choice in a single metro area like Cape Town or Joburg.

Amobia offers a saving of between 87% and 16% on monthly recurring costs:

Speed	Telkom Diginet	Amobia Wireless	Saving
64Kbps	R1594	R200	87%
128Kbps	R2226	R400	82%
256Kbps	R2579	R800	69%
512Kbps	R3279	R1600	51%
1024Kbps	R4655	R3200	31%
2048Kbps	R7269	R6080	16%

Let’s see, bullet list news for the week..

• I watched Paris Je’taime at the Labia today: not bad.
• Last night was a pre-house-warming party at Georg and Andrew’s new place. They make a nice couple, hehe.
• On Saturday morning, Mia and I went swimming at the gym. At first she was as stubborn as only her mother can be.. had to do some convincing to get her to swim. She loved it. She jumps into the pool, with her head going under the water like a little otter.
• After Jonathan’s GeekDinner pep talk about doing what Romans do in Cape Town, Mia and I went to see the Noon Gun on Saturday afternoon. We had tea and milk tart at the Noon Gun tearoom and visited Erf 81 to go see some goats, chickens, puppies, pigs, ducks, horses..
• Thinking back, it was one of the most fulfilling Saturdays ever. I guess it took me a while to acclimatise to this parenting thing, but it’s awesome being a dad.
• Mia’s new favourite phrase is: “What’s that?”
• Anton will be visiting Cape Town in July in the same week as my birthday.
• Mia and I attended Georg’s leaving Stellenbosch party on Friday evening at Fandango’s.
• There’s an article about Amobia in the latest iWeek magazine.. “puts us alongside the big guns!”

I’ll upload pics soon.

Have a fun week crazy kids.

The brief history of Amobia..

Before Amobia was founded

Early in 2002 David Jarvis contacted Joe after finding his personal homepage, looking for Linux geeks to help him build a wireless network in Cape Town. It sounded like a fun challenge, so Frogfoot started doing consulting work for Uninet.

We did network design, routing, QoS, proxy servers, VSAT configs for DVB decoder cards, weird and wonderful asymmetric source routing hacks, some Mikrotik configs, BGP routing etc.

David had just returned from Mozambique where he had built a similar network. This was an interesting time for outdoor wireless networks in South Africa because of the regulatory challenges and questions about the legality of building wireless network infrastructure. It was not even legal to use VoIP back then. A group called Megawan had attempted building wireless networks before and were shut down by the telecoms regulator. In many ways this was the wireless wild west and we knew a few of the cowboys.

We liked the new wireless toys, it was interesting technology and using it was legal in most parts of the civilised world. It was easy to argue that using it was “for the common good”.. and best of all, there was demand, which provided rapid growth opportunities. People were not happy with the incumbent monopoly telco and ADSL services were expensive.

Uninet was routing most of its outgoing and local traffic via Frogfoot’s network at the time and using a big VSAT dish for incoming international traffic. Frogfoot built a Linux QoS server for Uninet. This allowed Uninet to offer always on, rate based internet access at a good price.. an attractive value proposition.

We saw the whole evolution of outdoor wifi.. from PCMCIA cards in Windows PCs (crazy as it may seem) with long antenna cable runs, then simple (dumb) bridge devices, PPPoE, 2.4Ghz 802.11b, then the first wireless CPE routers, followed by 5.8Ghz 802.11a and eventually custom (managed) CPEs. (Customer Premises Equipment).

Frogfoot developed an embedded Linux CPE operating system, which later became the Blio CPE software.

We were happy to be the geeks in the background. David was a true pioneer.

A possible merger, Amobia version 0.1

In late 2004 it was announced that the legal landscape would change. VANS would be allowed to use VoIP as of 1 February 2005 and there were strong indications that VANS would be allowed to build their own networks. Actually I think it was announced that VANS could self provide at that point, but ICASA and the DoC seemed happy to maintain a state of uncertainty.

We started talking about a Frogfoot and Uninet merger. There was talk of using the Amobia brand for the new company. We never managed to make this idea work. Maybe the two company cultures just did not match.

The Amobia Brand

Joe came up with the Amobia name. It has a reference to the amoeba cell based organism. This was the third swimming animal brand… frogs, moon jellies and amoebae.

The Amobia logo was created by a designer we hired at the time.

The mustard yellow, black and burgundy red company colours were inspired by Joe’s favourite wine at the time: Waterford Kevin Arnold Shiraz 2002/2003.

Amobia Communications (Pty) Ltd. was registered in 2003.

Amobia version 1.0

After the Uninet merger idea did not work out.. we parted ways in a spirit of friendly competition. A few months went by and we found ourselves past the Feb 2005 date.

We wanted to build a wireless network to leapfrog the existing wireless providers with a “greenfields” deployment. Do it right, from the start. All 5.8Ghz, no legacy 2.4Ghz equipment.. fully redundant routing, dual backbone routers per site, a 3 layer network with a private IP network for management and a secure VPN layer. No PPPoE. A portal to manage configuration and field-upgradable CPE software. Simple.

“..there has been no case in history where the pioneer became the dominant producer, whether you are talking about a business or a science. The most successful innovators are the creative imitators, the Number Two.”

Frogfoot had the knowledge to design and manage networks, but let’s face it.. we were geeks with skinny touch typing wrists. We needed some muscle on the ground to physically build wireless networks. At one point we tried tracking down an old spearfishing contact, then a paratrooper turned sysadmin.

We started talking to one of Frogfoot’s oldest clients about the idea: Cape PC Services. They were interested. We had a meeting and we started building the new company. It was a simple 50/50 deal.. over a handshake you could say.

Frogfoot would contribute, existing knowledge, management systems, design, marketing, sales and support. CPCS would contribute, network deployment, installation team management, billing and operational things.

We connected our first client in Nov 2005.

Early on we had the vision that wireless is not perfect and it’s hard to get right, but we would engineer systems around the technology to make it work. A wireless network fit for the the African continent.

Fast forward

Amobia received a VANS license. In 2006 a letter from ICASA made 15 wireless providers form WAPA. Amobia and WAPA found a super hero lawyer: Dominic Cull. Amobia connected 100 schools for the SchoolWAN project. We managed to attract a number of big corporate businesses as clients, mostly through our “can do” problem solving attitude. Amobia’s franchise model was a success. Amobia was included in the Individual ECNS license conversion process and we had some fun writing an 80+ page business plan in 5 days. WAPA and Amobia initiated high court legal action asking for a declaratory order on the rights of VANS to self-provide network infrastructure. Amobia now has infrastructure in Gauteng, Western Cape, Eastern Cape and Northern Province. We’re about to launch a wifi hotspot service as our “last yard” distribution model.

Our next major challenges are to get an ECNS license, maybe raise some money and grow the franchise business.

It’s not easy running a telecommunications infrastructure business in South Africa, but it’s very rewarding watching it grow and seeing the impact it can have.

Rock ‘n Roll.

John Thwaits, technology journalist for BizAssist Technologies interviewed me about Amobia. The article should be in Business Opportunities magazine soon. I asked him if I could publish an online version here..

Amobia Communications Broadens the Wireless Horizon

Amobia Communications builds wireless networks to bridge the last mile gap. They have pioneered an innovative way to deploy wireless access networks and offer high speed wireless broadband services.

Amobia’s focus is on the emerging need for cost effective connectivity which can be rapidly installed. Amobia’s offering is the first practical alternative to Telkom’s Diginet leased line service. They have quickly built up a client list of “blue chip” companies simply because their clients prefer dealing with a smaller and more dynamic networking company.

The company has recently had growing media attention with the launch of it’s Johannesburg network, its contribution to a project to connect 100 schools wirelessly (SchoolWAN) and it’s part in the ongoing high court legal action to fight for the rights of smaller network operators to build their own network infrastructure. Johann Botha, one of Amobia’s directors speaks to BizAssist telling us more about their business.

How does Amobia differ from other wireless internet service providers?

Amobia’s wireless technology is cost effective enough to allow us to build network infrastructure with an organic business model. We have a vision of empowering local entrepreneurs to build and grow the Amobia network through a franchising model. Amobia has an inclusive business model, providing only infrastructure services in the business market. This allows us to partner with other ISPs to provide internet access to their customers.

When did you roll out your network?

We’ve been involved in the outdoor wireless business since 2002, but Amobia only built it’s own network in 2005. We connected our first customer in October 2005.

How does a client go about connecting to your service?

We install a CPE (Customer Premises Equipment) unit on a clients’ roof. The CPE device consists of a wireless transceiver with an integrated antenna unit, as well as a router board running our own custom embedded Linux operating system. Our software allows us to update and monitor the equipment remotely. The customer connects via a standard Ethernet point inside the building. Clients usually add a Wifi access point to create and indoor wireless LAN.

What is a ‘Last Mile’ connection?

‘Last mile’ or ‘local loop’, is a term used in building access networks. It’s basically how we distribute connectivity from a point of high density, usually an exchange or data centre, to the end user’s home or office. ADSL is another example of a last mile technology.

Is it your vision to establish a wirelessly connected city such as the metro-wifi projects in cities like Los Angeles?

We’re currently focusing on being an outdoor fixed wireless service provider, but we have plans for wifi hotspots as part of our “last yard” distribution model. We are about to launch a wifi hotspot offering after a pilot project with a network of about 50 hotspots performed very well in the town of Potchefstroom.

Is it a broader reaching alternative to WiMAX?

Yes, to an extent. WiMAX is also an outdoor wireless technology, but it’s not nearly as cost effective as Amobia’s technology. We offer solutions that will also benefit customers who are in remote locations and cannot receive mainstream internet access.

Would you offer wireless equivalents to compete with Telkom’s fixed line voice services?

Many of our clients use our wireless services for VoIP, but we don’t officially support voice services on our network at the moment.

Are you using Telkom’s Infrastructure or do you have your own?

We operate our own ‘last mile’ network, but we use Telkom’s services for the internet access side of our business.

What franchise opportunities do you offer?

Amobia has a successful franchise model for building networks outside metropolitan areas. We essentially packaged all the technology and systems we developed and created a business opportunity for entrepreneurs to provide a viable alternative to Telkom in their own communities.

Johann Botha is a founder and a director for Amobia Communications (Pty) Ltd. and chairman of the Wireless Access Providers’ Association (WAPA).

More info:
www.amobia.com
0861 AMOBIA

Update:
Online version on BizAssist Website
Print version will be in the next copy of Business Opportunities magazine.

More news on WAPA’s VANS self provisioning case..

DOC to oppose WAPA court application

ps. this Johann has two n’s.