The past few days haven’t been great for us Capetonians. With the recent power problems we’ve been having, Eskom, the local power company (well, we don’t have any choice in the matter – the joys of monopolies), has had to resort to rolling power cuts in order to avoid having to cut the power to the entire city.

On Sunday morning at around 2:30am we had a city-wide cut. When I woke up in the morning, I wanted to check the status of the blackout, so tried to access IOL, one of the better local news providers. Of course, my laptop had been powered up and on AC power when the power was cut, so the battery was dead by Sunday morning, leaving my mobile phone’s browser as the only choice for accessing the Internet.

When I visited the IOL site, I got an error message stating that it could only be accessed by MWEB Namibia subscribers and that if I wanted to view the contents I’d have to subscribe to MWEB (a local ISP). What the heck? This is me, sitting in Cape Town, using my Vodacom mobile phone and trying to access a local site and being blocked by MWEB (who I’m guessing are somehow involved in IOL’s hosting). Gee, thanks MWEB. I had to resort to visiting News24.com for news on the power failure. Even more annoying, I have no problem accessing the IOL site using a Citrix server and proxy sitting in Germany (which I often do from work), but can’t access it using my mobile phone. Argh!

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