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Compact, affordable and easy-to-use, our Home Office UPS will keep those load shedding blues at bay.

If there’s one thing we all need, it’s access to an affordable and reliable backup power supply. Last year we launched our 40W Fibre UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) to keep your Wi-Fi network connected when load shedding strikes. This UPS allows you to continue streaming, browse social media or search online with up to four hours of uptime.

We’re proud to announce the perfect companion to that UPS is now also available to rent via the Vox Shop.

Compact, yet mighty, the 500W portable Vox Home Office UPS keeps your most important devices powered up all at once when the power goes down. We’re talking laptop, monitor, printer and smartphone. Allowing you to continue working from home, uninterrupted, for up to four hours, no matter what.

Related: Vox UPS: Powering up a Darkened South Africa

The Vox Home Office UPS features lithium ion batteries for longer uptime. While its pure sine wave inverter ensures only clean power reaches your devices, helping to prevent any damage that can happen when a power surge occurs.

If you’re not working, the 500W UPS is also powerful enough to keep your TV and DStv decoder running anywhere from two to four hours. Meaning the only tantrums you’ll hear during load shedding will be deciding what to watch.

Related: Vox Introduces Small UPS to Keep Users Connected

And, just like our Fibre UPS, the Home Office UPS is extremely user-friendly. It offers plug-and-play installation, with 24/7 support just a phone call or email away – should you need it.

Frogfoot Networks (Pty) Ltd, a licensed open access fibre network provider, has announced that it has commenced with a phased rollout of its infrastructure in the Limpopo capital Polokwane. Areas that have gone live with high speed broadband internet are Bendor Park and Welgelegen, with over 600 homes passed, though this makes up just around 10% of the company’s planned fibre network rollout in the city.

 

According to Frogfoot Head of Sales, Shane Chorley, the expansion forms part of the infrastructure company’s strategy of rolling out fibre to secondary towns across South Africa, including the likes of Bloemfontein, East London, Ermelo, Middelburg, Pietermaritzburg, Richards Bay, Witbank, and others.

 

“Frogfoot is expanding in these towns as they meet our criteria in terms of the number of houses that can be connected, as well as the average household income in these areas. While we are looking primarily at the consumer market, there are opportunities to target certain types of smaller businesses that are based in and around the residential areas,” says Chorley.

 

Being an open access provider, customers in Polokwane stand to benefit from more choice and better service; with over 80 internet service providers (ISPs) operating on Frogfoot Networks, customers have numerous options when it comes to line speeds, whether they have a capped or uncapped account, data package sizes, and more.

 

“Previous experience of expanding our network around South Africa has shown that these smaller towns are data starved, and that the introduction of affordable broadband connectivity leads to noticeable changes in user behaviour. It might take a while, but as people become exposed to the possibilities of quality high speed internet, they consume far more data than before,” explains Chorley.

 

Users are increasingly watching or streaming videos online, and in higher quality, as well as using the internet for more of their communication, education and even skills development needs. Turning to cloud services means they can access their productivity suites and other business tools – and their data – from any device or location.

 

Chorley adds that as with other areas covered by Frogfoot Fibre, the company is looking to foster partnerships with local businesses and communities, to improve safety and security through the rollout of fibre-connected CCTV cameras, and assist educational institutions with access.

 

“Schools within the coverage area can apply for a fibre link as part of the company’s schools promotion campaign, which gives these institutions access to a free FTTH connection of up to 1Gpbs, with their preferred internet service provider,” concludes Chorley.

 

Representatives from Frogfoot and leading ISPs will be at local shopping centres and along roads in Bendor Park and Welgelegen from 20 to 26 January to engage with residents on the different fibre packages on offer and to answer any fibre related questions. Follow Frogfoot on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to find out where the activations are taking place.

 

To see if your area is part of the Frogfoot FTTH network, go to the Coverage tab on the Frogfoot website.

About Frogfoot Networks

Frogfoot Networks (Pty) Ltd (frogfoot) is a licensed open access fibre network provider. With 15 years’ experience in the telecoms industry and widely acknowledged for their technical excellence, Frogfoot intends to play a pivotal role in the growth of fibre to the business and home in South Africa. Funded by Rand Merchant Bank (RMB), Investec and Metier Capital, group revenue exceeding R1 billion per annum, and one of the only true open access wholesale fibre network offerings in the market, Frogfoot is well positioned to build and maintain fibre networks that will enable service providers to acquire their own fibre backbones on a shared network. For more information go to www.frogfoot.com.

Johannesburg, August 2019: Integrated ICT and infrastructure provider Vox has announced the launch of Atmos, a service that provides South African businesses with a cloud-based call recording solution that is safe, secure, and complies with local data and privacy regulations such as FICA, PoPI and more.

Developed by Call Cabinet Corporation, an industry leader in enterprise voice logging and call recording, Atmos is the first fully cloud-based solution of its kind to be introduced into the local market.

“Whether you need to record calls for staff training, dispute resolution, compliance or security reasons, the Atmos voice logger delivers a complete and flexible solution, which is scalable and has unlimited storage for calls and other sensitive data, without the need for any additional hardware or installation services,” says Natalie van der Merwe, Senior Product Manager for PBX at Vox.

The calls are backed up and stored in the cloud, and redundancy is offered across multiple servers and geographical locations or time zones, giving users the ability to search, sort, locate and playback calls within seconds, with the information easily accessible through a secure, web-based portal, that is also compatible with mobile device browsers.

Furthermore, all calls are individually secured and encrypted using 256 bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) at the source, with a rotating encryption methodology that is unique and specific to each call made and recorded.

These measures ensure that the call logging and voice recordings are fully compliant with regulation such as the Consumer Protection Act (CPA), the Financial Advisory and Intermediary Services Act (FAIS), the Financial Intelligence Centre Act (FICA) and the Protection of Personal Information Act (PoPI).

“While large enterprises may have on-premise solutions for call recording, these are often beyond what can be afforded by smaller businesses, such as insurance brokers or travel agents. However, given the above-mentioned regulations, these businesses are now required to save calls for record-keeping purposes. Making use of cloud-based storage means that these small and medium businesses only pay based on what they use, offering them unlimited growth potential,” adds Van Der Merwe.

Even the said large enterprises stand to benefit from turning to more modern solutions such as Atmos; by moving call logging and recording to the cloud, they are able to get away from costly maintenance and support of onsite equipment.

Atmos can be seamlessly integrated for customers making use of a Far South PBX deployment, a Vox-hosted PBX service, or to any business routing inbound and outbound calls via the Vox network.

Pricing starts from as little as R395 per month. The packages on offer include up to five hours of storage at no cost; thereafter, an Express version, with up to 1 000 hours of storage; a Professional version, with up to 4 000 hours of storage; and an Enterprise version, with up to 10 000+ hours of stored voice calls. For more information, visit the product page on the Vox website.

Phishing attacks are on the rise and show no signs of slowing down. According to the latest Mimecast report “State of Email Security 2019”, we have witnessed an increase in phishing attacks globally. They report that 94% of organizations have experienced phishing attacks in the last 12 months.

There are various forms of phishing attacks but essentially all attacks attempt to gain sensitive, confidential information such as usernames, passwords, credit card information, network credentials and more, by posing as a legitimate individual or institution.

These attacks are becoming more sophisticated in order to get around security solutions that are being put in place across most organizations. The most common form of phishing is not typically targeting specific individuals but rather the likes of say PayPal which are cloned. Emails are then sent to many individuals instructing them to click on the malicious link to resolve account discrepancies in the hope of obtaining their credentials.

With spear phishing, the fraudsters apply a more targeted approach to his craft. While this requires a little more effort as the fraudster needs to acquire information about the targeted individuals, their task is made easier by using social media websites such as LinkedIn which has a wealth of information about the targeted individual.

Whaling is a form of spear fishing where executives such as CEOs are targeted. Gaining access to a CEO’s email account would allow criminals to target individuals in the organizations’ accounts department instructing them to release payments to the criminal’s account.

Criminals are not only using email as an attack for phishing. Phishing is a form of phishing where criminals use the telephone to obtain personal information through social engineering.

So what can organizations do to prevent these attacks? The solution would require a holistic approach that would include security specific solutions, awareness training as well as changes to internal accounting controls. The first step is to implement security solutions that protect the company’s email environment. Vox offers a range of best of breed security solutions which are specifically designed to mitigate the risk of phishing attacks.

While these solutions will significantly reduce the risk of phishing attacks, it is important to remember that implementing a security solution is not enough. Security solution providers are constantly innovating new features to meet the increasing sophistication of these attacks. This means that the solution would require constant management by certified security specialists. Vox understand this relationship between product and skills and offers fully managed security services to ensure that the customer remains protected.

In addition to the security solution and managed services, organizations would need to institute a security awareness training for their staff. Security awareness training would provide education to employees to the dangers of phishing or other online scams. In the case of Vishing, security awareness training provides the only line of defense. Lastly, companies would need to improve internal controls to mitigate the risk of whaling attacks as previously mentioned.

In the event of a successful whaling attack, improved internal accounting controls would ensure that payments are not made to the criminal’s account.

October 2019, Johannesburg: Even though the Fourth Industrial Revolution has been a focal point in recent months, less than 2% of South African rural households can access the internet from home. Clearly there is work to be done if more people are going to be part of the connected economy.

This is a challenge that integrated ICT and infrastructure provider Vox has taken to heart. While initially targeting coffee shops, restaurants, and other small service businesses when it was introduced earlier this year, the Vox WiFi Retail Lite solution has the potential to disrupt the way internet access is provided to farming communities.

Designed to empower farmers with an affordable way of giving their workers access to reliable high-speed internet, it all but eliminates the reliance on GSM services beset by poor reception and high mobile voice and data rates.

“Up to now, farm workers have had to pay exorbitant prices for entry-level voice and data packages. To make matters worse, connectivity in outlying areas often results in dropped calls, slow internet speeds, and an inability to stay in touch with their loved ones,” says Jacques Visser, head of wireless at Vox.

Rural workers who have children living in school hostels and family members working far away deserve a better way of communicating with them. Satellite connectivity is the cornerstone on which the Vox offering is built, doing away with the need for traditional cell signal. Furthermore, Vox has structured the WiFi Retail Lite offering to be affordable while still delivering a world-class service to farming communities across the country.

“We are giving farmers the opportunity to create a WiFi network for their workers where they can make free voice calls to any South African number and access the internet. Given how technology has evolved, satellite services have become far more competitive when compared against other forms of fixed, fixed-wireless, or wireless solutions. This makes it an ideal replacement for ADSL,” he says.

This sees farmers having a dedicated voice channel for themselves and allocate another one for their workers. And its user-friendly dashboard means viewing data usage is a swipe of a finger away.

“Vox is providing farm communities with an alternative and reliable way of becoming connected. For too long, farmers and their workers have had to wait at the back of the line when it comes to high-speed internet access. We are changing this and giving them the means to finally join the digital age in a more affordable way than before,” he concludes.