I was invited to a function hosted by woosh.com to mark their ChCh rollout last night. As I was invited on behalf of the CLUG, I'm filing this report for the benefit of members. I just re-read this and it sounds a bit like an ad, but I was excited by a competing broadband product, and I am thinking of giving it a go for my office connection.
There were drinks, and food, and a bit of a spiel from the Chairman Rod Inglis, a nice fellow. No powerpoint presentation yah! There were opportunities for questions, I'll come to that. Woosh is based on cellphone technology, therefore they need cell towers, same as telecom and vodaphone et al. They currently have 4 towers in central chch, with coverage basically within the 4 avenues. This will be expanded over time, but there are obviously issues with availability of sites and obtaining resource consents. This means you can take your laptop and the modem to anywhere that woosh have a presence and connect to the net. Or you can take the modem and the installation cd and use it on a friend's computer in another city. The service is delivered via a "modem" about the size of a largish cigarette packet, which can connect to your computer via a supplied USB cable, and it comes with drivers for all versions of windows from 98SE upwards. I naturally asked about linux support and Rod deferered to his network guy, a very knowledgable techo guy. He explained that if you got the addon ethernet cable you could connect to any OS that supports PPPoE, so that is the path for both linux and mac users. Naturally you get the unfiltered real world IP address on your ppp0 network interface, so you would want a firewall, I know IPCop does PPPoE, so it would seem to be a good mix. I also asked about fixed IP addresses, they said the home plans were strictly dynamic IP, and the business plans could be given a fixed IP for $20 per month, I tackled him on this charge later and he said APNIC were very tight on handing out IP addresses and he had to convince them that he was using them wisely. I guess the $20 is there as a deterent mainly :-) This same techo guy was very enthusiastic about linux in their infrastrusture, as I guess is normal with ISP type organisations. So there we have a competitor in the broadband market in chch at last. And its here now in the central city, and will expand. A summary of costs is something like this, the plans include isp services and an email address (@woosh.com I think): Modem $199.00 Ethernet cable: $34 Plans: Home, (250 kbs) Unlimited (subject to reasonable use) $54.95 per month 1G max: $39.95 per month Business (350 kbs) 2G $99 per month 5G $179.00 per month 10G $299 per month Business (500 kbs) go see for yourself on woosh.com :-) -- Nick Rout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
