Your voice needed for SA broadband

[yusufwadee]

Main thing would be the price, i believe if cheaper more people would use it, 2nd, quality of support service, have someone that knows whats happening when you have an issue, 3rd would be speed, also if we get faster speeds, it needs to be stable at that speed

[Superspeed]

1) Peer all cache servers to avoid unnecessary bandwidth usage
2) Naked ADSL
3) Drop the MTR to 20 cents
4) Get the Minister of Communications and ICASA to stop messing around and start doing their jobs.
5) Relax the barriers to entry on cellular and spectrum networks.

[BrendanMc]

When does this close?

[uncapped_shady]

I just had a thought that would almost certainly guarantee better up time and speeds.
That would be to incorporate broadband to homes by means of satellite. You would have a satellite dish mounted on your roof or wall that gets "tuned in" to face a central satellite that in turns distributes broadband to your home.
I mean think of DSTV and how it works, and the idea doesn't sound that far fetched at all to supply bandwidth to homes by using that means.

The problems it will solve are the following:>Cable theft would not affect your internet
>No cables to get wet or disturbed by your homes electric fence for instance
>Limits the amount of technical staff required to go and repair faulty cards on the
exchanges in all the different areas (as there won't be any )
>Have internet in hard to reach places or where laying copper or fiber is not possible
>The satellite signal has no limitation with regards to range.

the only cons i can think of would simply be that you could experience broadband issues when the weather gets really bad or will it?

Anyways, i thought that with the ever-changing technology this would be a really cool way to have internet almost anywhere.

[BrendanMc]

Guys,

You need to post in one of the following sections, and not here.

--What needs to be done to sort out broadband in South Africa?

--National Broadband Network (NBN) for South Africa?

--ICT Policy DoC feedback

See the original post on Page 1 by RPM.

Thanks

[kilos]

Some interesting reading from the US National Broadband Plan

[ChristoC]

stop talking about The Talk. Try and ACTION aspects....3g reception is so inferior here in Cape Town I returned my iPhone 4 to my service provider. The monopoly of telkom is the personification of evil business tactics. We need clear cut healthy competition against the ancient fossil of a business model of telkom. for crying in a bucket.....

[ichigo]

Guys,

You need to post in one of the following sections, and not here.

--What needs to be done to sort out broadband in South Africa?

--National Broadband Network (NBN) for South Africa?

--ICT Policy DoC feedback

See the original post on Page 1 by RPM.

Thanks

Dont think they read cause I also repeated that on the first page

When does this close?

Would love to know also

[Yasheel]

To keep this short and to the point.
S.A is continuously playing catch up with the rest of the world. However, we have made great strides in improving infrastructure. The problem comes in our utilisation.
In the telecoms business the main focus is profit (like any other). How is this profit reached?
Simple, give the citizens the bare minimum to keep them content at premium prices. For example, try to access wifi at your local shopping mall, its slow and you'll have to look for a bank to rob to get any joy from it, if any.
For households, we are practically held at gun point by internet providers. Sell your house and car and hopefully you'll be able to get a package where you don't get old waiting for pages to load.
Criticism aside. Cell C, Mweb are setting new standards with their aggressive marketing. Promoting competition amongst the major competitors and making them work for their piece of the multimillion rand profits will assure S.A world class standards.

[Yasheel]

To keep this short and to the point.
S.A is continuously playing catch up with the rest of the world. However, we have made great strides in improving infrastructure. The problem comes in our utilisation.
In the telecoms business the main focus is profit (like any other). How is this profit reached?
Simple, give the citizens the bare minimum to keep them content at premium prices. For example, try to access wifi at your local shopping mall, its slow and you'll have to look for a bank to rob to get any joy from it, if any.
For households, we are practically held at gun point by internet providers. Sell your house and car and hopefully you'll be able to get a package where you don't get old waiting for pages to load.
Criticism aside. Cell C, Mweb are setting new standards with their aggressive marketing. Promoting competition amongst the major competitors and making them work for their piece of the multimillion rand profits will assure S.A world class standards.

[BrendanMc]

Dont think they read cause I also repeated that on the first page



Would love to know also

Watch this be a 6 page thread by the end of the comp lols

[ichigo]

Watch this be a 6 page thread by the end of the comp lols

Lol well at least we get less competition so more chance of winning

[amanica]

Unused data bundles should not expire within 2 months, prepaid airtime does not expire so why does prepaid data expire?
If the minimum expire time can not be fixed across all providers, then they must at least be forced to disclose their expiration time with all advertising.

[Keeper]

Instead of listening to ANY of our ideas, why not just follow what Australia did?

Here is some reading:

Gradually, larger ISPs began taking over more of the delivery infrastructure themselves by taking advantage of regulated access to the unconditioned local loop. As well as significantly reducing costs, it gave the service providers complete control of their own service networks, other than the copper pair (phone line from the exchange to the customer). The first competition to Telstra's DSLAMs was provided by then Optus subsidiary XYZed, launching business-grade xDSL services from 50 exchanges in September 2000. Competition in the residential infrastructure market began in 2003, when Adelaide-based ISP Internode installed a DSLAM in the town of Meningie, South Australia. Several other service providers have since begun deploying their own DSLAMs. The presence of non-Telstra DSLAMs allowed the service providers to control the speed of connection, and most offered "uncapped" speeds, allowing the customers to connect at whatever speed their copper pair would allow, up to 8 Mbit/s. Ratification of ADSL2 and ADSL2+ increased the maximum to 12 Mbit/s, then 24 Mbit/s.

In 2005, Telstra announced it would invest A$210 million in upgrading all their ADSL exchanges to support ADSL2+ by mid 2006, though they did not say whether they would continue to restrict access speeds. However, in 2006, they announced new intentions to substantially alter their copper phone network and setup a "Fibre to the Node (FTTN)" network. This was later scrapped, with Telstra citing regulations forcing it to provide cheap wholesale access to its competitors as the reason not to invest in upgrading their network.

In late 2006, Telstra uncapped their retail and wholesale ADSL offerings to the maximum attainable speed of ADSL to 8 Mbit/s, however with a limited 384 kbit/s upstream speed. This has allowed many Australians access to higher speed broadband, while the comparatively lower wholesale rates discouraged competitive infrastructure investment in most cases.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Australia


So there you have it DoC, the answer is simple: Local Loop Unbundling
Nothing else, nothing more, nothing less.

Access to the unconditioned local loop is all it will take, and is all we need.

[NolteG]

The government should implement a service improvement program whereby they firstly perform a pricing analysis based on the broadband costs from 5 countries on each continent and then calculate the average cost from this.

Once this average cost is known legislation should be put in place to prevent all ISP's from charging more than this cost.

Zones should also be created to indicate which areas are developed and which are rural in South Africa. ISP's should be forced to implement connectivity in rural areas based on a ratio of how much they sell in developed areas. This will ensure they make an effort to develop rural areas as well.

An independent organisation like ICASA should develop apps which report back to a central database / website where you can register and your connection performance should be recorded and stored for 6 months. You should be able to view and use this performance data to receive credits from ISP's for poor performance. This will stop them from over selling, over charging and under delivering.