Telkom not to blame for slow broadband

[pmbellis]

Whatever your feelings about Telkom might be, their response holds merit. ADSL is not meant to be used for uploading data between offices. You are free to get a dedicated link from Telkom, Neotel, Vodacom or whoever offers data links.

ADSL is meant for best effort internet and nothing else. Yes, it might be "slow" for mission critical business purposes, but then if it is that important, you should buy a proper service instead of trying to blame a product that is being used outside of its designed purpose.

PS: Pigeons may be faster over 70km, but the ping time is 5 hours and it won't win from JHB to CT.

PPS: The Unlimited are telemarketers who call you and try to hard sell you SOS Assist services on your cellphone. They have called me at least 6 times in 2 years. My hate for them is unbounded.

Yes, we need faster broadband in this country. It will happen. Pulling stupid, unscientific publicity stunts is not the way to go about it.

Let's see ...
Winston the Pidgeon
... 4Gb / 2:06:57
= 4,000,000kb / 7617sec
= 525.14 kb/s

Telkom ADSL
... 4Gb * 4%
= 160,000kb / 7617sec
= 21.00 kb/s

Ratio:
525.14 : 21 = 25 :1

Therefore Winston was 25 X faster than Telkom!

For full parity to be achieved, the distance would have to be increased by 25 (I read 70km?) = 70 X 25 = 1750km! (umm, what's the distance from JHB to CT again?)

Now we ALL know that as a real-world exercise this was a joke ... but nevertherless ... 21 kb/s ??? THAT's a joke!

[rogerwe]

This experiment is like racing a pigeon against a car in reverse over a mountain. Obviously the pigeon will win because cars aren't designed to drive you around in reverse.

<sigh> The analogies are going from bad to worse.

[Just_Ice]

<sigh> The analogies are going from bad to worse.

Leave it They are quite funny!
Do the pigeons impose a cap?

[Vegeta]

I had pigeons when i was a boy... Cost of raising a pigeon R0 it eats anything you throw in it's cage(left overs will do(it likes mielies)). Cost of training the pigeon R0, A homing pigoen just does it by itself... its nature. Cost to buy the pigeon R0 just put out some food and get a cage close to where you see homing pigeons. Catch it and keep it for a while after that it will return to its new home by instinct.

So... pigeon = R0
ADSL = R [more than anyone can afford]

[gregmcc]

hehe - you've been slashdotted

http://idle.slashdot.org/story/09/09...-S-African-Net

[rogerwe]

Leave it They are quite funny!
Do the pigeons impose a cap?

Only if it flies in reverse up a mountain.

Sorry I'm being silly now, but that's Telkom for you...no rationale.

[maudrid]

For those registered on Digg.com please digg this article up.
http://digg.com/d313ngL

[Kawak]

Now I can finally compare apples with apples, I was just at the post office sending my friend his glasses to poland (he is now studying there), the glasses came to just over 220g (including the evelope) and the cost to send it via airmail was R54 and it takes 7 days.

So here it goes, if I send a 128GB flash drive (there are ones out there many times larger so i'm making telkom's life easier) with post to poland it costs me R54, the same bandwidth @ R44 per gig will cost (44*128 = 5632).

And at the standard upload of ADSL @ 512kbps it will take 24.27 days to complete this transfer....

I think winston can fly faster then that and still find time to meet up with other nice pigeons, sun bath at the mediteranean, have some italian coffe and a host of other things...... oh.. and all of that probably won't add up to cost R5632.

[porchrat]

hehe - you've been slashdotted

http://idle.slashdot.org/story/09/09...-S-African-Net

SA got slashdotted twice in one week. That has got to be a record for us.

[VertigoZA]

People. For goodness sake. This is a very important test. Regardless of wether it's Telkom in SA or AT&T in the US or whoever for that matter... the fact remains.. in 2009, the fastest way to move a 4GB file, over a 70KM distance, is via carrier pigeon ... That is freakin' sad.

[The_Librarian]

"Several recommendations have, in the past, been made to the customer but none of these have, to date, been accepted. It must also be noted that Telkom is not the customer's core service provider," said Hector.

Can there be elaborated on what recommendations have been made to that customer?

Core services? But you provide the cable which connects point A to point B, and trying to blame somebody else for your shoddy network is not right.

This is another reason why we need to have LLU right now.

[RaptorSA]

<sigh> The analogies are going from bad to worse.

Yeah dude. Always entertaining -yet so sad- to see how people kiss their own asses with creatively misplaced logical back flips while missing the point completely....

[The_Librarian]

So.

Let's stop moaning and grumbling. Enough of that.

What solutions do you guys propose?

[RaptorSA]

So.

Let's stop moaning and grumbling. Enough of that.

What solutions do you guys propose?

This so called "media stunt" has done us a great favor I think, even if nothing comes from it I've seen at least 4 international news sites hosting the article, not to mention that "carrier pigeons" and "still faster than" are now trending topics on Twitter (we're even on Engadget.com, and from the comments it's obvious District 9 has also suddenly put us "on the map", so to speak). Hopefully this will show South Africans that it's possible to use international internet driven media to make the outside world aware of our situation, if only we can come up with interesting ways of doing it (I love how this pigeon-idea uses comic to get the point across instead of an all-out attack). If this doesn't wake companies like Telkom up, nothing will. At least we've tried. Let's hope Telkom's competition picks up on this and decides to slash prices down quickly in order to gain more customers based on all the thousands of people and their mocking statements on social media sites and blogs.

It's incredible how everyone's frustration with Telkom just exploded once there was a valid channel to funnel it into. This is exactly what's been lacking in South Africa since, well, I can remember. Ordinary people taking things into their own hands and using communication and technology to voice their concerns into a snowball effect. I'm truly proud, and all those people who think this is ridiculous only prove to me even more what's wrong with the mentality in this country.

It has nothing to do with the validity of the "Pigeon test", but about collecting concerns and opinions into one entity, rather than having millions of concerns that are simply lost on inane blog posts and facebook rants.

That said: "What solutions do you guys propose?"
Well, just spread the word. Join the Facebook groups, retweet on Twitter, comment on articles or re-paste any cool comments that people make about our situation and keep the word alive for as long as possible. It's time these companies realize it's OUR money they're using to provide these services, and it's US they should respect, not the other way around. We have millions of jobless people in SA, and we pay the same money as any other country to construct our telecoms infrastructure, yet we pay incredibly high prices for a fixed line service compared to almost all other countries. The fact that our wireless providers are much more competitive just shows how much potential there is when competition exists in a free market. There's NO EXCUSE Telkom, laziness, lack of motivation, greed and incompetence is all that's left now, fix it dammit, it's not too late...

[Yarik11]

I think that a lot of people are missing the point here.

This wasn't supposed to be a scientific experiment produced in a controlled environment and with independent variables.

The point was to show how useless Telkom is by getting a pigeon to deliver 4 gigs of data faster.

Telkom is charging everyone a lot of money for slow, capped internet.

Since they are a monopoly, many people don't know any better, they don't complain.

So its only "unscientific publicity stunts" like these that will open people's eyes and hopefully get consumers to start complaining more.