|
How can we not give our Users a voice to comment on the Electricity emergency that South African users are currently experiencing?
Daily and sometimes twice daily unannounced power cuts ironically termed "Load - Shedding" have been the norm in Gauteng in the last couple of weeks. Gauteng being , the province that is the financial hub of South Africa. I found being gridlocked in virtual darkness on the main arterial route between its the two major cities Pretoria and Johannesburg reminiscent of "day after tomorrow" type movies.
So How do we remain trading under these circumstances? Actually its quite amazing at how quickly products geared for this have emerged. There are cheap solar panels ,rechargeable lights ,gas light and other proliferating the market now.My choice was this one:Its an "invertor" with a car-batter attached.It has 3 pin and 2 pin power points that lasts for 8 hours and powers 300 watts . We can plug in the computer ,screen and printer and an energy saver globe. It actually cost only a few hundred rand.
Other service provisioning has also been effected - I grew tired of waiting for Telkom (Stated owned Telecom company) to fix and add new lines for me. I should now thank Telkom for being so inept . I was forced to switch to V.O.I.P. (Voice over internet protocol) today , and I discovered something which still blows my mind. Its called S.I.P. Its a low bandwidth VOIP standard. Skype is also a VOIP service , but Skype is bandwidth intensive whereas SIP even works over GPRS. I have an adapter that connects to my old 1998 telkom handset. It crystal clear , almost eerily so. Now for the part that makes my hair stand on end. I installed something called fring on my mobile. Its a free program .Heres the link http://www.fring.com .I put in my SIP VOIP account details and realised that I can phone landlines from my mobile at landline prices ! It is going to shave over a R1000 off my cell phone account.
Best of all I am no longer dependant on entirely Eskom or Telkom for service provision. If the power goes we put the PC and ADSL router on the battery pack . We are now able to invoice , print and carry on trading in all respects.
Feel free to add comments below or an interesting story of how you
powered up your business or got stuck in the lift on a way to a
meeting. People need to know about the power crisis here because that
is in fact what it is.
|
