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Please note Frogfoot’s new phone numbers:

Office: 021 448 7225
Fax: 021 448 3754

At the moment the old numbers are forwarding to the new ones, but please start using the new numbers.

Frogfoot Networks announced the sale of its consumer client base to Web Africa this week. This move allows Frogfoot to focus on the business internet services market.

“Web Africa is most probably the best consumer focused ISP in South Africa and we are confident that our consumer clients will find a happy new home with them” says Johann Botha, director of Frogfoot Networks.

The ISP industry is South Africa is showing a trend of consolidation as the telecommunications market is faced with accelerated change. Successful businesses will need to adapt and move with these trends as more competition is introduced to the market.

Frogfoot’s new focus aims to address a rapidly emerging need for specialist technical skills in the networking and ISP market. People with these “deep tech” skills are a rare breed and are often lured overseas.

“We enjoy managing complexity and we are good at creative problem solving”, says Botha, “let’s just say we were not optimally using our experience and skills selling commodity services where we could not add much value”.

The new Frogfoot will focus on building networks. Scalable, highly available, carrier-class networks. Frogfoot’s strategy is to be ahead of the curve as new networking technologies are adopted in the local telecommunications market. Frogfoot builds and manages networks though its partnership with Extreme Networks and strong Linux and Open Source skills.

Frogfoot sees a need for aggregation in the local ISP market and aims to help its partners benefit from economies of scale by providing carrier and core networks, peering and traffic optimisation. Frogfoot will work with partners, helping them to provide new and unique services to the market.

Frogfoot Networks is an independent technology company providing innovative internet services and open source solutions for business. Frogfoot’s service offering includes: Wholesale Connectivity, Managed Network Services and Consulting. Frogfoot was founded in 2000 and is based in Cape Town.

More info:
www.frogfoot.com
0860 KERMIT

A change in direction and a new focus

As of 1 August 2008, Frogfoot will no longer be providing consumer internet services. Frogfoot’s consumer division has been sold to Web Africa.

Frogfoot will focus on the medium and large business market and will no longer be providing commodity internet services like, ADSL, Web Hosting and eMail in the consumer market.

Frogfoot’s consumer client base will be migrated to Web Africa in the month of August. Frogfoot will still be providing support and handle billing in August.

Web Africa is most probably the best consumer focused ISP in South Africa and we are confident that our clients will find a happy new home with them.

Frogfoot will retain all its larger, business and enterprise clients.

Tighten up the main sheet

Tighten up the main sheet is a sailing phrase. It generally means you want to go faster but you’re willing to let things get a little more exciting in the process.

Many moons ago, in the story that is Frogfoot Networks, two networking geeks focused on building a company that catered to the very specific needs of other businesses. Years past by and along the way Frogfoot agreed to host some websites for a few friends and sold ADSL to someone’s cousin’s mom. That consumer base grew and grew, partly because Frogfoot was so well respected but also because we were just good at solving problems. We also had a fun name… who doesn’t like frog’s feet?!

Growth and success however does have it’s challenges. Frogfoot has grown into a business that looks after the high-tech networking requirements of some of the top companies in South Africa. We’re very proud of that fact, but as you can imagine it puts a little bit of strain on our ability to keep our regular consumer clients happy.

Providing consumer internet services is a unique challenge. It’s a competitive industry, with low profit margins. We enjoyed the challenges of building automation systems and optimising internal processes in our consumer division, but it placed a strain on our company.

Our staff were being stretched to capacity. We weren’t keeping up and it was starting to affect the quality of our service. We were forced to make a choice.

We have chosen to migrate our consumer base to one of our partner companies. We will however do everything within our power to make sure that your services are not affected.

New adventures in Frogfoot (v3.0)

It some ways we’ve made a full circle return to our initial business model. Back to the days where we pretty much knew every client on a first name basis.

Where to from here? The first step is to regroup, adapt to the changes and then focus on a small number of big and exciting things on the horizon.

In general we’ll have more focus, a better signal to noise ratio in our day to day activities and more time. We’ll aim to build more personal interactions and relationships with our clients.

It’s safe to say we’ll be doing the things we are good at.. building networks. Large scale carrier and core networks. We’ll aim to move up a step in the ISP food chain. We’ll seek opportunities to innovate, solve complex problems, have fun learning about new technologies and play with cool toys.

Thank you and goodbyes

So, on this sentimental day, we have to say goodbye to our consumer clients, wish them well and thank them. This step will give us the focus to provide the best possible service to our remaining clients.

A big thank you to all our clients, partners and staff who have been a part of our journey. Keep an eye on our blog.

Frogspeed!

Frogfoot is moving to new office space today.

Our new address is:

Suite 20-102D, Building 20
The Waverley Business Park
Kotzee Road
Mowbray
Cape Town

Introducing the Frogspot Network

Frogfoot Networks is creating a revolutionary Wireless Broadband Network and motivating a wide community of people to help them build it. Using inexpensive Wifi technology and an innovative business model they plan to offer broadband internet to a broader market.

Frogfoot wanted to build a business model that would stimulate the entrepreneurial spirit in people. Something that would spread through word of mouth. Something fun and innovative that builds recurring monthly revenue. A viral business model.

They created a model that empowers entrepreneurs to build and operate a Broadband Access Network, extending the reach of existing internet connections with Wireless Hotspots. Think of their business model as a way for a community of people to build infrastructure in a distributed and democratised way. “Share with your neighbour, but make some money for your efforts” said Johann Botha, one of Frogfoot’s Directors.

Consider the untapped potential that could be unlocked by adding a hotspot to every existing internet connection in South Africa. An ADSL line which used to serve one or two people could now server 10 or more. Frogfoot is betting on each of these network end-points blooming into a Wifi Hotspot to reach thousands more people. With more than 100% month to month growth over the last six months, their bet seems to be paying off.

“At Frogfoot we like to say: Let the animals run the zoo!, which captures our vision of empowering entrepreneurs to build networks.” said Johann. “We set out to build a business model which we would have wanted to get involved in ourselves.”

“People are setting up Hotspots in suburbs or apartment complexes and are making enough money to pay for their own internet usage, plus they walk away with a few hundred rands in their back pockets” said Jonathan Endersby, one of Frogfoot’s developers.

Frogfoot’s end-user Wifi costs are amongst the lowest Wifi access costs available with packages as little as 12c per megabyte. The company also sells various scratch cards with denominations as small as 25MB for R9.95.

The Green Agents

Frogfoot recently launched their Hotspot Agent program. Hotspot Agents help build a network of Wifi Hotspots by introducing new Hotspot Operators.

Hotspot Agents earn 20% of profits from Hotspots they introduce. And best of all, this is an ongoing passive income stream.

All an Agent has to do is have a cup of coffee with someone and say “This Frogspot thing is really cool, look at their website and go order yourself one.”

While the offer might sound too good to be true it’s actually built on solid business principles. Frogfoot benefits from the increased reach given to them by their Agents and in turn gives the Agents a cut of the profits.

“The crux of this model is that if someone gets a few hotspots on their books they’ll be making money without doing any work” said Jonathan “… and that money will keep on appearing in their account every single month for as long as the hotspots are moving megabytes.”

About Frogfoot:
Frogfoot Networks is an Independent Technology Company providing innovative Internet Services and Open Source Solutions. Their service offering includes: Wifi Hotpots, ADSL, Linux Virtual Servers, VPNs and Web Hosting. Frogfoot was founded in 2000 and is based in Newlands, Cape Town.

More information:
www.frogfoot.com
0860 KERMIT

I just added a new page and a diagram as a high level overview of the Frogfoot Hotspot business model.

Feel free to post a comment if you have questions.

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (codenamed Hardy Heron) was released this week.

The Frogfoot mirrors have been updated and we have created a new Xen server image. You can now order a Grid server running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on our Grid page.

If you have a Frogfoot IP address, you have free access to our mirrors. Your /etc/apt/sources.list should look something like this for Hardy:

deb http://mirror.frogfoot.net/ubuntu hardy main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://mirror.frogfoot.net/ubuntu hardy-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://mirror.frogfoot.net/ubuntu hardy-updates main restricted universe multiverse

Long live Ubuntu!

We just finished building a new page for our Grid Servers. Nice graphics to emphasise the USPs (Unique Selling Propositions).

If you have a Frogfoot Xen server, please let us know if we captured all the reasons why you like the service.

We are about to add more Grid (host) servers again as the service is gaining popularity.

Grid Servers start from only R49/Month.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way Frogfoot could notify you when we add new content to our blog?

There is a way. Our website’s ATOM feed gets updated as we update the site and allows you to quickly and easily check for new content. You can read more about Web Feeds on Wikipedia.

You’ll need a feed reader. I use a Firefox plugin called Sage, but there are many others.

Next, click on the big orange feed icon under ‘Feed The Frog’ in the right-hand-nav to subscribe to the Frogfoot feed. Happy feed reading.

ps. Frogfoot also has a Noticeboard feed to inform clients of general network status events.

To celebrate the launch of our new website, we’ve designed a Pirate Radio t-shirt.

We are giving away 10 of these groovy geeky fashion items.

We’re looking for comments, feedback and constructive criticism of our new website and blog. What are the things you would change? How could we improve it? How do you like the design and structure?

Post a comment or even better, create a pingback/trackback by linking to this post.

We’ll review all the feedback by Friday the 18th and select the best ones.