pupa
05-12-2003, 11:12 PM
I am a newbie here but realy note that the tone here is as I felt for a long time. I were voicing my frustrations to <b>Telkom</b>, <b>DSTV</b> and other money racketeers e.g. <b>Goverment Municipal services</b> for a long time. Being overseas many times and in different places and experiencing what You can get for <b>Your hard earned money </b>I were frustrated everytime I return and compare <b>what we get at what cost</b>. Telkom as you said protects current revenue by overpricing new and improved services that should actually be less expensive. Nobody should forget the cost per call from private line to cell... so bad most medium companys bar cell calls. Telkom made ISDN cheaper and market it for ""home use"" so they could make space for the ADSL bracket. Dont forget that they got the goverment to stem competition by forcing ISP's to use dial up connections and made cell dial up illegall untill recenly. Now that it is available it is priced beyond the affordability of the mass consumer<b> AGAIN</b>. DSTV is just as bad as Free to air services are deliberately witheld and you even have to pay R180 rand per year to recieve local SABC1,2,3 and eTV on a spare decoder if you dont want PAY channels. Originally they were forced by goverment SABC to tranmit these signals as part of their licence agreement. A few year's ago this were just removed with no information leaked to the public , it just dissapeared of the air unless you pay. I must even pay an additional R50 to use the dual view decoder 2nd channel facility. South Africa is doomed while we are sucked dry by these corporate Leeches. Just look at the cost of Telkom facility's in India and compare with us. We are subsidising Corporate expansion in the rest of the wold. One of the Car manufacturing giants revealed recently on a TV program during a discussion of why South African pay through their necks for cars localy ""We dont really have the numbers to justify local manufacture "" he said. Thus we have to pay the export price. To bad we dont have a Hitler to look after our folks as with Volkswagen in the older Years.