Dear Steve, lets get civilized. Scale.

[doobiwan]

All this warmongering is just getting both sides heated and not thinking straight.

I understand Steve Whites point about maintainence is a valid arguement BUT it's still not acceptible to charge what they do. Yes the foreign providers bundle the charge with the service, but it's still way less than the local line access charge. Out of interest a fairly good 24 port DSLAM is about $4000-5000, which is about R1500 per port, so that's their installation costs out the window.

I don't mind having to pay a minor support fee, say 10% of the August prices to Telkom/"The provider" (so about R27pm). it's doesn't bother me too much if that is hidden in an ISP cost or transparent.

The key arguement is that total cost of a decent ADSL service is 4x what it should be. How they split the cost is between them and the ISPs.

Telkoms biggest own-goal is their continued arguement about economy of scale.

The idiots guide version:

"Dude,

If you dropped your @#$@ing prices, you'd get your @$@#ing 500000 users, and more, in a flash.
"
or

"Dear Mr White

The longer you wait the more people will still be undecided by the time the SNO gets competitive. Even if that's 2007. The longer people have to wait, the more likely they are to be disgruntled by your service and the more likely they are to choose your competitor.

Your company made a Multi Billion rand plus profit last year, so stop whining about a 1 Billion rand network. Stop firing people, allocate them to the ADSL roll out, and get deploy enough DSLAM ports to support a growing economy.

Regards

Me"

[Vio]

I don't mind paying a access charge either if its a low additional R23 or so for ADSL access, but the problem is Telkom wants you to pay for the Speed of the access which is utterly foolish since the maintenance of the line does not cost more according to the speed. ISP's should dictate your speed/cap after all.

Doesn't ADSL run over the same ATM network as our phone calls? If this is so there is no "extra" component to pay for other than the DSALMS and their maintenance.

[Vio]

I don't think this belongs in "news" section btw :)

[arf9999]

this has to be the most succinct rebuttal yet! :D

[Clipse]

Of course it cost more, think of a racing track.. if you travel at 300km compared to 100km / hour, which would do more harm to the road. */me puts Telkom analogy away*

bahahaha

[Sneeky]

If Telkom did drop their prices to get more users, stop to think about the poor techies trying to instal all of these things. They have cut their staff so much they would not be able to cope, they cant cope at the moment. Its comedy hour at Telkom ,permanently.

[Albereth]

Forget about thinking about a racetrack. What ever left your house travels as fast as it can along the bits of coppper cable. It really does not matter what 'speed' of service you think you have - the little bits of information are blitsing along as fast as their little legs can carry them. Telkom then slows down the perceived response (and so do a whole bunch of other factors) so you think you get 192, 384, 512 or whatever the number is.

Depending on the modem you have, does it care what 'speed' of service you have? And your computer, does it wear out because you have ADSL instead of dialup? There is NO additional wear and tear on the pieces of copper because of 'speed' choice.

What does impact is quality of service. If you have interference on your line you may lose data which will have to be resent and that could result in a perceived lowering of bandwidth - the pipe is still full but you could only use a bit of it. Hope that's a clear enough analogy.

[duderoo]

To keep up with the demand all they need to do is bring in the self install option and we can do it ourselves and they can install loads more per day.