2Talk Max

Well, there are a few things that nobody can live without. One of them is obviously the internet. Ever wondered what you would do with out it, or what you do when there is an outage.

Anyway, I have chosen 2Talk max to be my ISP and VOIP provider. Beamed wirelessly from the sky tower not too far from my apartment, it gives a similar experience to that of Kidanet in Fiji. The fact that it is Wimax by Alvarion is understood but the Consumer premises equipment is more like that of Unwired- self install, indoor variety. I personally have the $65 a month plan which gives me unlimited traffic on the internet; something that nobody else will rival. They also give a phone line with two local numbers and 500 minutes of calling to landlines in most popular destinations, though this does not include Fiji. Other providers give a 5GB capped connection and landline with local calling only for $80 a month.

The service is excellent for the most part with close to 6 mbit downstream and around 3 mbit upstream speed. Something hard to find in most DSL services. On the other hand, I have had a few outages in the past few days for which I’m not all too pleased about. On the whole though, the service is quite good and cost effective.

The Spray Can

How Many ISPs Actually Give IMAP Email

Almost all ISPs give regular POP email to their subsribers and customers as this is the cheapest system. However, there may be some of them which actually have IMAP, although quite rare. If they do, they are likely to say that they acrually have it as it is a plus point for them. I know of an ISP which does offer IMAP but simply does not admitt or state that they do and provide no instructions or server names. This ISP is Fiji International Telecoms LTD subsidary, Kidanet. It’s a shame that they don’t openly state this, I would think of it as a great advantage as it at least makes the service usable. I suppose it’s the prerogative of the ISP to advertise this.

Just for your information the server will be just mail.kidanet.com.fj just like the POP and SMTP ones. However, you must select that you wish to use an IMAP email service in the email client to use it. IMAP is better than POP because it allows syncronisation of folders with the server so when acessing web mail, the mail repositiory is current.

The Spray Can

OpenDNS

I recently tried the free domain name service OpenDNS after my ISP’s DNS servers suffered some problems. Although the ISP DNS servers were O.K at first, they began to show problems like blank pages and occasional service shut-downs. Although at the time I had not read any reviews of the service at the time. Most of the time people don’t have issues with their DNS service but chose to use OpenDNS because of the features that they offer like spell correction, faster load times and anti-phishing filters. In my case I was really looking for a solution to a problem, however, my experience was rather short lived. Since I do not reside in the US which is where most of their servers are located, I ended up getting certain sites in the US edition rather than the localised editions of the sites. Having also read of some reviews and a few comments about the service, I have since then decided to use the openDNS server only as my secondary DNS. The primary remains to be my ISP’s DNS server.

Has anyone else had the same problem? What are your views, post your comments.

later