South Africans feel like they are paying for fibre speeds they don’t need

Frankie64 said:
Ja , i dont get this about ZA , there are millions of pensioners out there, an untapped market.
But there are no pensioner packages available from any providers.
Its a shame.
As pensioner , i would be happy with a 20/10 line good enough to watch netflix at a decent affordable sub R400 per month fee.
Instead of being forced to pay for speeds i dont need or require.
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WanderingMind said:
My parents was forced to upgrade because the lower packages was dropped by company.

That's what happened.
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Yeah. I'm with Herotel. They drop everything below 60Mbps. 50Mbps was more than enough for my family's need.
I think most people are not "paying for fibre speeds they don’t need", it is rather the ISP's that is not selling a good variety of packages and cheaper options. Money is king.
 
Speedster said:
What is the use case for these speeds for home/residential use. We have 50/10 for a family of 5. We've never had any issues streaming on multiple devices, online meetings etc. I realise I might not know what I don't know, so kindly enlighten me.

The one pain I do have is the slow upload, 10mbps is slow for anything that matters
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A week or two ago I had to do a Google Takeout for photos, and store in S3 glacier - 4TB of photos. That went fairly quickly as I am on multi-gigabit up and download fiber to my house.

Do I use that all the time? No, but it's cheap enough that it doesn't matter and when I do need to do something that involves large transfers it's not going to tame me months to do.

In other countries if you pay for a television service, if you chose it, also comes over the fiber line (there are no satellites as that's legacy).

This reminds of that "3gb is enough for everyone" **** that kept South Africa back for so long. Just because you don't have a use cas for it, doesn't mean others don't.
 
whatwhat said:
A week or two ago I had to do a Google Takeout for photos, and store in S3 glacier - 4TB of photos. That went fairly quickly as I am on multi-gigabit up and download fiber to my house.

Do I use that all the time? No, but it's cheap enough that it doesn't matter and when I do need to do something that involves large transfers it's not going to tame me months to do.

In other countries if you pay for a television service, if you chose it, also comes over the fiber line (there are no satellites as that's legacy).

This reminds of that "3gb is enough for everyone" **** that kept South Africa back for so long. Just because you don't have a use cas for it, doesn't mean others don't.
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I never said others don't. In fact, I actually asked them to explain their use case so I could understand better
 
Speedster said:
I never said others don't. In fact, I actually asked them to explain their use case so I could understand better
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Unfortunately, as soon as someone needs to explain their use case - not everyone is going to agree that it's a valid case. Someone might say they stream multiple video streams, and then someone else will counter and said they can do four 4K HDR 120Hz streams on a dial up modem, so anything more is not needed.

And then MyBroadband did a massive disservice with their constant "bandwith hog" articles every couple of months as well.
**** them.

Bandwith and data is extremely cheap. The infrastructure and support and installation around it might not be depending on the country, but the data itself costs an ISP next to nothing once the pipe is in the ground. A gigabit line sitting idle costs almost the same to run as one being hammered 24/7. So the "bandwidth hog" framing was always dishonest – it blamed users for a capacity problem that was really an under-provisioning and over-subscription problem on the ISP's side.

Which is exactly why nobody should have to justify their usage in the first place. You paid for a line with a certain speed and no cap. What you push through it is your business. The moment we accept "explain why you need it" as the standard, the goalposts get set by whoever has the most modest use case in the room, and the ISPs get a free pass to sell something they never intended to deliver.
 
And here I am absolutely overjoyed that we have just over 12mbps on Vodacon lte this morning....
 
Speedster said:
I never said others don't. In fact, I actually asked them to explain their use case so I could understand better
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I went from 1Gbps to 50Mbps years ago.
(I'm a Data Engineer who works at home for overseas client).
Thought I'd get the slowest package when moving into my new place, make sure everything is stable, working etc. then upgrade later to higher tiers again...

That never happened. The only obvious difference was no more sub 1-3 min .torrent downloads and larger backup uploads or downloads obviously take longer, but they happen once in a blue moon and the added extra monthly cost for those periodic needs makes zero sense.

I also stopped gaming years ago, which I think is quite a big deal, I think if someone's a "gamer" then those massive downloads could become an issue, however, even with that I don't see how it's worth the extra monthly cost instead of just leaving stuff to download overnight.

Even at work, if I'm pulling large datasets (or uploading them) I'm doing something wrong, you're supposed to be using cloud infrastructure these days, so I do. What I found made a much bigger difference than internet bandwidth is the past few years is that my fiber (and ISP) is now much more stable than it used to be, and that works great in conjunction with the rollout of home solar systems and battery backups. Just being able to spin up an OS or container on a little homelab and waiting for it to do its thing feels like something that was more of a chore and gamble years ago and could be helped with higher bandwitdh. Now, I just don't really care.
 
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whatwhat said:
Unfortunately, as soon as someone needs to explain their use case - not everyone is going to agree that it's a valid case. Someone might say they stream multiple video streams, and then someone else will counter and said they can do four 4K HDR 120Hz streams on a dial up modem, so anything more is not needed.

And then MyBroadband did a massive disservice with their constant "bandwith hog" articles every couple of months as well.
**** them.

Bandwith and data is extremely cheap. The infrastructure and support and installation around it might not be depending on the country, but the data itself costs an ISP next to nothing once the pipe is in the ground. A gigabit line sitting idle costs almost the same to run as one being hammered 24/7. So the "bandwidth hog" framing was always dishonest – it blamed users for a capacity problem that was really an under-provisioning and over-subscription problem on the ISP's side.

Which is exactly why nobody should have to justify their usage in the first place. You paid for a line with a certain speed and no cap. What you push through it is your business. The moment we accept "explain why you need it" as the standard, the goalposts get set by whoever has the most modest use case in the room, and the ISPs get a free pass to sell something they never intended to deliver.
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Complete strawman. My question had nothing to do with cap, only the residential use case for multi-gigabit connections. I totally get some people might have a legit use case for it. I don't. At least I don't think I do.
 
Speedster said:
Complete strawman. My question had nothing to do with cap, only the residential use case for multi-gigabit connections. I totally get some people might have a legit use case for it. I don't. At least I don't think I do.
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IMO probably can be put down to those who want 4K and those who couldn't be bothered.

DreamKing said:
the worst part is you paid but no service.
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Don't even get me started.... :-/

You'd think one of the giants would like to excel and capture the market, but nooo, this is Africa after all!
 
whatwhat said:
A gigabit line sitting idle costs almost the same to run as one being hammered 24/7.
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That's not really correct, it's whatever the peak throughput is for the network, so as long as you're under that, costs are pretty much the same.

It's why I'm pro just 100Mbps and then 1Gbps packages, the 100 being the makes a small profit one, while the other makes an actual profit, but the many different packages means you can extract a bit more via market segmentation.

Most of the time 1Gbps doesn't matter as video streams and stuff, users will be using under 15Mbps, unlike with DSL where most of the time you'd use 90% of your line (as a stream was 3-4 Mbps on a 4Mbps line).
 
RaptorSA said:
I also stopped gaming years ago, which I think is quite a big deal, I think if someone's a "gamer" then those massive downloads could become an issue, however, even with that I don't see how it's worth the extra monthly cost instead of just leaving stuff to download overnight.
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Most of the time it's useful having faster for gaming if people decide then and there what game to play, e.g. Wanted to play sniper elite with brother, it's a 33GB download, at 50Mps that's near 2h, so wouldn't be able to play, at my current 600, it's under 10 min.

Allows you to adapt rather than plan ahead, good for my friend groups, doesn't really matter for anyone that always plays the same game or SP.
RaptorSA said:
Even at work, if I'm pulling large datasets (or uploading them) I'm doing something wrong, you're supposed to be using cloud infrastructure these days, so I do.
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That's a it depends. I have the hardware locally, having that in cloud is a lot more expensive and requires extra management, rather just download the 100GB datasets and crunch them locally, then wipe when not needed.

Could host it on a VM, but why, plus local code debug, it's faster runs due to lower latency. All depends on what you work on.
RaptorSA said:
What I found made a much bigger difference than internet bandwidth is the past few years is that my fiber (and ISP) is now much more stable than it used to be, and that works great in conjunction with the rollout of home solar systems and battery backups. Just being able to spin up an OS or container on a little homelab and waiting for it to do its thing feels like something that was more of a chore and gamble years ago and could be helped with higher bandwitdh. Now, I just don't really care.
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Yep, latency/stability of fiber (and cable) is why I don't use mobile, even if it would be faster.

The spin up container / images in home lab is also why I like my faster net, pulling an image for a quick test being 10-20s vs a few minutes is often difference of being distracted and doing something else and forgetting about it. Lots to do, so little time. ;)
 
Johnatan56 said:
That's a it depends. I have the hardware locally, having that in cloud is a lot more expensive and requires extra management, rather just download the 100GB datasets and crunch them locally, then wipe when not needed.
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Used to do the same but I've stopped doing this whenever possible.
Downloading a client's data onto a local network, no matter how secure I think it is, is a big no-no and just not worth the risk anymore.

Ephemeral cloud architecture for ad-hoc tasks can be a huge pain to get going and can take ages, but these days I don't care anymore. Policy is policy and I get paid for my time so it's OK (even if it's super tempting to just clone stuff locally sometimes and get the work done).

Don't let me get into a rant about what I think about shared cloud compute and what a f**ing unstable complex and overengineered mess it has sometimes become.
 
Johnatan56 said:
It's the easiest way to keep people on a higher priced package, people research when they get it, then just leave it as long as price increases are around inflation matched. Providers also hope that people get used to higher speeds, e.g. 50-> 100Mbps doing something like a one hour download becomes 30 minutes, and wouldn't want to downgrade again.
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I get their reasoning. But then just bump people to a higher speed without changing the price and introduce a slower cheaper speed for those that can't afford it.
 
NR7 said:
Fibre speeds need to get faster and cheaper.

Had a look at US fibre plans and they start around R500-R600 for 300Mbps with options for 500Mbps/1Gbps/2Gbps.
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In real terms that's about R200-300. I know the excuses of equipment and everything being priced in Dollar but those are capital investments. Our labour is cheap in comparison but we don't see that in the prices.
 
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