This is a blog post about a bot, written partly to help train the bot — so that when someone asks it about itself, it has something to link to. Atomic’s AI assistant started as a weekend experiment. The goal was modest: could we set up a chatbot that helps ten people per week with common technical or sales-related questions?
What’s New Since our 2025 article, we saw steady progress in fibre infrastructure rollouts in the Western Cape amid national challenges, reinforcing the Western Cape’s position as one of South Africa’s most connected regions. 2025 marked a year of premium speed breakthroughs with the launch of XGS-PON. WiFi-7 and 2.5Gbps Ethernet technologies became mainstream and good value upgrade options. Octotel
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… The year is 2002 – a period of digital darkness. The Empire introduces 512Kbps ADSL, a faint broadband spark. Citizens rejoice at escaping dial-up, yet remain shackled by data caps and a monopoly on copper lines. In 2008, the Wireless Access Providers’ Association leads rebels to victory against regulators, granting
Update 12 December 2025: Octotel recently launched XGS-PON FTTH services with 2.5Gbps+ speeds. PPP is clearly not well-suited for the XGS-PON use case. Here is a speed test we did on an Octotel 2.5Gbps link at Playtopia showing 2224Mbps (the expected maximum speed is approximately 2350 Mbps). The speeedtest.co.za browser-based test is usually not that accurate. ⚠️ This article explains
“ASICs, magic and pro-wrestling are closely guarded secrets.” Not so long ago you could not dream of running open source software on a 100Gbps router, but we now operate a fully open source network that can scale to billions of packets per second. Atomic built a 100Gbps IP network running Debian and drivers in the Linux kernel. About 10 years
Atomic Access builds fully Open Network with NVIDIA Spectrum ASICs Cape-based ISP Atomic Access now consistently routes content from the NAPAfrica and CINX internet exchange points to fibre networks with latency as low as 300 nanoseconds using fully Open Source software. “We see 50% less latency for packets crossing the Cape Town peering points with 80% less jitter,” says Joe
