In advance, sorry for the long post........
Purely out of interest, if I am paying R62 or so for a gigabyte of data, this money goes to my ISP (non-Telkom) which then pays a portion of that, say R50, to Telkom for that gigabyte. What does Telkom do with this R50? Upgrade cables? Haha. Add new ones? Haha. Buy some Telkom shares? Maybe. What happens when you're a TelkomInternet subscriber and you pay X per gigabyte? Does TelkomInternet pay R50 to Telkom-proper for it? I somehow doubt that. Pointless even if they do. It's like me paying myself a salary, from my own bank account, into my own bank account, for regularly washing my dishes in the evening. Makes it look like I'm busy. If TelkomInternet is not really paying their respective R50 or so a gig, then they have a MASSIVE amount of weight to throw around and can use this to effectively strangle the "abuse"-style ISPs.
In a sense, Telkom is once again very smart. They have the majority of low-usage users who don't know any better and don't want to change ISP because of having to get a new e-mail address. They have allowed the high-usage people to move to other ISPs under the lure of 30gigs a month "cheaply" (those are BIG inverted commas), and then they pull the carpet from under those ISPs' feet and bam, suddenly you have a divide where these ISPs are stuck, generally, with high-usage users and are paying dearly per gig and so can't afford to do the TelkomInternet shared-usage thing. TelkomInternet, of course, can, and for this I take my hat off. If only I could still afford to own a hat.
Nocturnity, I couldn't agree more. In a way, the only complaint we can realistically have against Telkom is that when they had their monopoly extended under conditions that they act somewhat in the country's interests, they simply took the opportunity to make as much money as possible. And hell, they're doing an excellent job.
The government, more specifically the ANC, is responsible for sorting out this mess since they are the ONLY ones in a position to do so. You can't appeal to a corporate complaining about their price, they don't care. You have to go one level up, and in the face of no competition to move your business to, that means the government.
Sadly, we all know the ANC's stand on this all too well, and especially nowadays seeing the internal chaos going on there I can hardly believe that the ANC bigwigs will be turning their attentions to deflating their cashcow and acting in our interests? Haha. Forget it. They have an expensive indaba to cover the costs of, not to mention enough legal fees to cover up corruption scandals, and to pay the likes of Ivy to pick her nose and fall asleep. It's hard work to keep so out of touch.
For what it's worth, in my opinion, the ANC is suffering from the same "sickness" that almost all (maybe all of them, even) of Africa's leaders suffer from: a strange belief that simply being a politician means that you deserve to be rich, despite it being at the expense of so many people. They seem to be nearly incapable of thinking in the long-term, and are quick to jump to short-term goals and, what's worse, to sell these short-term *great* ideas to an unsuspecting, impoverished public.
Imagine what it must be like to be given a budget of, say, R10 million, and being told to do something useful. Imagine you're Ivy. You've got this R10m, but hell, you're getting a bunch more in kickbacks from Telkom & friends, so what do you do? You need to make a name for yourself so you dream up a stupid scheme of sorts, it really doesn't matter at all what you choose. The of the "N2 Gateway Project" near Cape Town, for example. Go campaiging, spend some time away from your solitaire and spend R1m making fancy brochures and writing long documents, laced in jargon. Seem important, that's what counts here. Now, after you're done with that, having been careful to take about 6 months to do this much, you now "launch" your campaign. Get everyone excited, make a public appearance, get some bigwigs to come and sponsor them an exorbitant lunch. Maybe the lunch will cost you another R1m, just to show that you mean business. Then what? Shut your trap for a few months, and if anyone asks "What happened to project X (insert your name of choice here) ?" you say "Yes, we are working on it. We are in meetings with Y (insert some random name or organisation here) to resolve disputes about some irrelevant rubbish, but we are working on it. Maybe by the end of the year." That should shut the public up for a while. Besides, they've got more important things to worry about. Time passes, your budget is steadily growing a fat amount of interest sitting unused in some nice high-interest fixed deposit. Where does this extra money go?? I have a few ideas, but I suspect Ivy (insert a lazy MP's name here) has beaten me to it.
Rant rant, sorry. My annoyance occasionally gets the better of me. Shutting my mouth ...
> but it would seem that the ISPs are, rightly or wrongly given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to pricing. Still - it would be interesting to no how their profit margins compare to ISPs from around the world. Obviously they are entitled to make money - they are providing a service. 
Prior knowledge from AKA's is invalid