It’s been rumored for quite some time now, here in Cyprus, but as they say, it ain’t true ’til the fat lady sings, pigs can fly, etc … you catch my drift, but even then it might not happen, cause guess what, we live in CYPRUS.

Seriously now back to the subject, considering the fact that something expected takes forever to materialize, the unreasonable long wait seems to just have shortened, in respect of ADSL speeds in Cyprus…

I am talking about the image below from my B-FOCuS Wireless 352+ which briefly insinuates that CyTA has allocated the folowing bandwidth on my account and i should be getting download speeds of 2368kbps and an upload speed of 448kbps, but i am currently NOT (CyTA seems to restrict the download speed to 1mbit).

I couldn’t really understand why everything was is kept hash-hash, till i had some conversations with people in the market, who made it all crystal clear to me.

Still wandering why Cyprus is still in the stone-age of ADSL speeds when our providers market a 2mbit download speed of as being “Speedy Gonzales”, where the rest of the world moves with 24mbit speeds having 2mbit as a bare minimum.

At first there was GOD only CyTA, providing all ADSL services, *monopoly abuse* but who cared…

As ADSL became more and more widespread, clientele became bigger CyTA did nothing to keep up, thus providing a really lousy service to the clients. Then people began changing internet service providers, -who leased CyTA lines-, promising better services, which somwhat reduced CyTA’s server load. Still nobody cared about CyTA’s *monopoly abuse*.

Then all of a sudden Cyprus became an EU member, and as such all EU member companies have to abide the EU regulations, and now somebody cares about *monopoly abuse* … did anybody ask them to ? come again ?

So, now CyTA has make room for the new market entrants in order to avoid any fines and penalties from the EU. CyTA therefore can NOT currently reduce prices and can NOT offer better services than its competitors, until it loses a major portion of its clientele to its competitors in order to favour fair competition.

In the end the ones in loss is the internet community that may not enjoy speeds and prices comparable to other countries.

Speculators though say, that from September 2008, CyTA clients may enjoy further reductions in prices and better services offered including increased ADSL speeds.

Only time will tell… if my patience doesn’t run out till then…

CyTA has recently (October 2006) began distributing a new modem/router device, the Alcatel Thompson SpeedTouch 585, that succeeds the older and never supported ECI B-FOCuS Wireless 352+ device. After the unsuccessful era of the Israeli devices, CyTA finally returns to the older and more trustworthy brand, Alcatel. Fortunately Alcatel is a well known brand with at least better support for its products compared to ECI, given that firmware updates float all over the web, and that counts for something.

It seems that CyTA is actively trying to subcontract the most-difficult-to-configure devices and does not even give the chance or technical knowledge to customers to configure the device for their own needs. It comes preconfigured to your residence or office and I am still wondering if CyTA technicians are capable or have the technical knowhow of configuring the device, or any other device of such matter. In any case this time CyTA actually bothered to setup passwords for accessing the router configuration interface to ensure that customers cannot mess with it (this pisses me so much), but I guess it is for the best for the not-so-technologically-literate-users-who-like-to-mess-up-every-device-that-floats-around.

But the struggle goes on…

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I recently got a hold on of a B-FOCuS MultiPort 342+ router and later exchanged it with a new B-FOCuS Wireless 352+ router, as an upgrade from my ISP. Unfortunately no configuration manual was supplied by the ISP in either case, so the NET was the only source of enlightment on how to configure the router to my needs.

To my total disappointment I was unable to find anything for a long time. Imagine my frustration when some links found in various forums and blogs were dead, unsupported or even in foreign languages I couldn’t read or translate. Fortunately enough using the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine I was able to get a hold on to the configuration manual of a similar ECI product B-FOCuS 270/285/400PR in hope the firmware was similar enough to help me configure my router. Once again my efforts were in vein. The firmware of the two products was different in all aspects.

Later on I found the confiuration manual of the actual product but in hebrew transaltion. The illustrations provided though served as a good guidance in obtaining the required knowledge as the firmware was practically the same.

After all this ordeal I decided to write a small router configuration manual explaining how I configured the individual device to serve as a router, wireless access point, UPnP devce, etc…

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