Sven Welzel — Der Blog

Tag: south africa

  • Finally – a German bookshop in Cape Town

    Hurray! Finally there’s a German bookshop in Cape Town again, albeit online. Gruffel.com allows you to order German books anywhere in South Africa and ships them to you. Or allows you to pick up your books at the German School or at the kindergarten.

    Select from the Spiegel bestseller lists, fiction and non-fiction as well as children’s books, as well as most recently newly published works. If it’s in print, it’s probably available. Gruffel is based in Cape Town, so you pay in South African Rand by bank transfer, they take care of tax, customs and excise.

  • DSL Network speed and connectivity in South Africa – Feb – Apr 2012

    It’s been a rocky start to the year of DSL connectivity with EASSY and SEACOM, among the major uplinks from Southern Africa, all were affected by outages.

    After a network outage between Abu Talat in Egypt and Marseilles, France was reportedly cleared on Feb 8, 2012, rumours surrounding additional downtime of the SEACOM network (more…)

  • 2 days, 18hrs to go – tickets for Cape Town matches plentiful

    That place on the web that sells tickets to the foot-operated sport worth billions taking place in a country featuring cities like Cape Town and Johannesburg this year – FIFA.com – has taken the count-down clock off-line – so I had to find other sources to give the 2 day, 18hr count-down.

    Meanwhile, there is some uproar regarding the takings some teams have in store for them as winnings paid by their own countries should them come home successfully from the World Cup 2010, even in the light of world-wide “financial pressure”.

    So, how much can each player expect to take home as earnings should they lift the trophy?

    • Spain: € 600 000 per player
    • Italy: € 250 000 per player
    • Argentina: € 510 000 per player
    • England: € 470 000 per player
    • Brazil: € 445 000 per player
    • France: € 300 000 per player
    • Germany: € 250 000 per player (Quarter-Final progress: a payment of € 50 000 per player, Semi-Final progress: additional € 100 000 per player, making it to the final: additional € 150 000 per player)
    • Ghana: € 100 000 per player should they reach the Round of 16 matches

    Let’s translate this into South African Rand (€ 1 = R 9.5014 on 8 June 2010 at 16:00), and compare this to the per-capita GDP in South Africa (latest World Bank figure (2008) is $5,678 (approx R 44 912.98 at the same conversion rate date, at $1 = R 7.91), Stats South Africa is offline (technical error):

    • Spain: R 5 700 840 per player ( 126.9 x South African GDP per capita)
    • Italy: R 2 375 350 per player ( 52.8 x South African GDP per capita)
    • Argentina: R 4 845 714 per player ( 107.9 x South African GDP per capita)
    • England: R 4 465 535.80 per player ( 99 x South African GDP per capita)
    • Brazil: R 4 228 123 per player ( 94 x South African GDP per capita)
    • France: R 2 850 420 per player ( 63 x South African GDP per capita)
    • Germany: R 2 375 350 per player (Quarter-Final progress: a payment of R 475 070 per player, Semi-Final progress: R 950 140 per player, making it to the final: R 1 425 210 per player) ( 52.9 x South African GDP per capita)
    • Ghana: R 950 140 per player should they reach the Round of 16 matches ( 21 x South African GDP per capita)

    So if Spain win, their 23-man squad takes home as much as 2918 South Africans earn (gross) in a year. I just worked that out. Compare that with www.capetown.travel‘s info regarding trivia on the new Cape Town Green Point Stadium: “More than 2 500 workers were employed on site during construction, and almost 1 200 artisans received training from the contractors.”

    Just a thought… Kinda surprising, but I guess that’s big soccer…

    Tickets are still available for Cape Town for the following matches in the following categories: (more…)

  • Ticket sales improving? 15:53 SAST vs 18:24 SAST Cape Town FIFA Ticket availability

    Seems like tickets are flying… check the usage at 15:53 SAST on 5 June below.

    Cape Town FIFA Ticket Sales at 15:53 SAST, 5 June 2010

    Now compare this with the availability at 18:24 SAST today same time (ie 2hr 31 min later), below.

    Cape Town FIFA Ticket Sales at 18:24 SAST, 5 June 2010

    Seems like tickets are near to the “sold-out” definition – but let’s wait for the re-shuffle to proceed…

    TimesLive reports that 58 000 tickets will be made available on Monday (remember my previous comment regarding the 90 000 tickets vs the higher number of tickets released?): (more…)

  • 6 days to go… tickets available again for the Soccer World Cup

    Wheel of Excellence, V&A

    So the big ticket shuffle has started again, and tickets that were “currently not available” this morning, at least for the Cape Town matches (France – Uruguay) are available again – if only in Category 1. An overall view shows tickets available across the board (especially in Polokwane and Rustenburg…)

    If you’re keen on getting tickets, keep checking back on the Last Minute Sales FIFA World Cup Ticketing site (as long as it’s up… <grin>) [oh, and add as many ™ and ® signs as you feel like – in your head (if you don’t get the joke, don’t worry)]. (more…)

  • FIFA Ticket Sales – update – 30 May 2010, 11 days to go

    So the booking system came back online on Friday – late afternoon; after it crashed in the morning, thus shifting online booking advantage drastically… Sigh. And now it’s “Sold Out” in all the good ones. Weren’t they going to release 160 000 tickets? And then it came down to 90 000 tickets…? Perhaps they reported it incorrectly on the news? (more…)

  • Soccer Ticketing 2010 – continued woes

    So more tickets went on sale today. Or did they? When I visited the http://lmsfwctickets.fifa.com/LMS link yesterday, I got an IIS7 welcome screen (Welcome to IIS7 — is that the new Icelandic Soccer Federation? 🙂 which was then fixed about 30 minutes later. That was after the IIS7 ASPX BSOD about their web.config file. Bad omen. This after previous hitech hitches…

    So tickets went online today at 9am SAST. Connection timed out. Connection error. But that has been fixed 3 hrs later:

    How disappointing… Sigh… At least there’s consistency in terms of ticket day launches…

    Perhaps there may be another few tickets on the horizon at some stage…

  • Soccer ticketing 2010

    The counter at the top of the page shows that there are 18 days (and 9 hours) to go before kick-off to the world cup. Have all the tickets sold out? Well, currently, there are signs that some matches are currently unavailable, but in the last 30 minutes, the selection screen has dropped down – from all matches, to just the first 14, to just the opening match in Johannesburg – which has not tickets currently available…?

    No options, no tickets, no sales… Hm…. I guess that’s one way of creating a demand…

    The entire ticket purchasing system is not available at present, please try again later…

  • SEACOM link was down again, stable now

    “SEACOM’s backhaul service provider link is down from Mtunzini to Johannesburg due to an unusual failure on both primary and secondary routes due to circumstances beyond our control. SEACOM is in the process of reprovisioning customers onto a tertiary route.” is what SEACOM announced today. Some ISPs confirmed that SEACOM connectivity was restored at around 15:24 SAST, though links were only stable around 16:20 SAST.

    (more…)

  • SEACOM cable issue resolved?

    The latest notification received from SEA-ME-WE 4 indicates that the repair work on the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable is expected to be completed by 22.00 (UTC) on 28 April 2010.

    That’s the update from SEACOM. MTN Business gives similar information.

    An hour ago, the link was marked as back up – the stability of the link will be shown by how fast / how slow the access on the web via the SEACOM cable is again, after the last few days of slow web access and intermittant internet connectivity via rerouting…

    Here’s hoping…!

  • Update on slow Internet – South Africa – due to SEACOM maintenance

    An update from Afrihost which echos what’s happening to IS-resellers of DSL bandwidth in South Africa:

    IS have removed ADSL users from emergency SAT3 backup and thus you will not be able to access international websites via the normal channels.

    Proxying is touted here to be the solution. Full background to the story of Seacom’s emergency maintenance is here: SEACOM maintenance extended until 30 April – South African Internet slow.

  • SEACOM maintenance extended until 30 April – South African Internet slow

    MTN Business (in their NOC notices) have confirmed what SEACOM had alluded to – the maintenance windows (and hence the high latency and traffic redirection via the SAT3 cable rather than the SEACOM link) has been extended until 30 April 2010. SEACOM in their notice on 26 April:

    The ongoing repair work is affecting several cable systems and has impacted negatively on the overall Internet connectivity in many regions across the Middle East, Africa and Asia, which rely to some extent on the availability of the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable for global connectivity. (more…)