ADSL pricing comparison

SaiyanZ said:
I'll take the BT UK unlimited 8Mbps option for R324 thanks.
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Me too what a bargain
So that makes Telkom approx 76x more expensive - way to go Telkom (46/0.6 average), at this rate thats going to be a Guiness World Record (Africa is way more expensive than SA except Morocco)
 
Well - to be fair to Telkom we actually have to look at the Australia/New Zealand picture. England is smack bang between the two wealthiest groups of people on earth, and its population density also helps.

Australia is a good comparison. Low population density, far from everywhere. For Australia I counted 14 different sub-marine cables (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_submarine_communications_cables) which compares to our current (excluding SEACOM) of 3 (SAT-2/SAT-3/SAFE). Maybe that is what makes the difference?

I would think there are more factors at play - Telkom made it so expensive for people to host locally that they host overseas - even if the users are most South African. Which makes the problem a lot worse.

My point is it would be interesting to see what the numbers look like from a hosting/service provider perspective and compare that as well. I suspect that while bandwidth is expensive for the consumer, it is really bandwidth to service providers/hosting companies that is suppressing innovation in South Africa. Although I hate a 3GB usage/month, I can almost just live with it. Companies that try to drive innovation can't. There should not have been any reason to cut call centers a special deal - the telecommunication portion should be the cheap part of the business and not the barrier.
 
Telkom offers consumers a 384 Mbps service with a 1 GB usage limit for R 199 per month.
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I've been conned :eek: I only have 384 Kbps :p
 
**Tiscali UK ADSL

Speed Category 8 Meg
IP Assignment Method Dynamic
Idle Timeout 0 minute(s)
Download Speed 7150 Kbps
Upload Speed 398 Kbps
Monthly Cost £14.99 = 197.327 ZAR

**Virgin UK ADSL

Speed Category 8 Meg
IP Assignment Method Dynamic
Idle Timeout 0 minute(s)
Download Speed 7150 Kbps
Upload Speed 398 Kbps
Monthly Cost £15.00 = 197.458 ZAR
 
im paying R1500 for 256 during the day and 512 after hours, Axxess time to make some changes (soon) or im looking elsewhere!
 
This also doesn't take into consideration the ADSL line cost and the fee for the telephone line. In many other nations they don't charge any ADSL "fee." And if there is a telephone line rental fee it includes unlimited local phone calls. Those two add another 200 rand a month to the cost to get internet here. FAR more expsensive than any other option.
 
my m8 in the UK pays 30 pounds odd, for 24mb/s adsl soft capped he uses over a TB a month easily, thats with cellphone, landline and satelite television in there aswell, fast speeds with caps are a complete waste of time, coz you will just be bying loads of top ups
 
Telkom etc
Do you think they have shares in Vaseline ?????
 
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jamezjunk said:
This also doesn't take into consideration the ADSL line cost and the fee for the telephone line. In many other nations they don't charge any ADSL "fee." And if there is a telephone line rental fee it includes unlimited local phone calls. Those two add another 200 rand a month to the cost to get internet here. FAR more expsensive than any other option.
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Im pretty sure those prices included the ADSL line fee (think those are the one price options ) .. but I didnt hop onto the Telkom website to double check .. but my ADSL cost at Cybersmart was 524 and that was including ADSL line rental (cant see Telkom being THAT far off the mark ;) .. but I do see the point about no actual phone rental required in other countries)

I hate reading these articles .. makes me depressed ..

Roll on Seacom .. counting the days
 
This comparison is a bit flawed. You can't compare Rand to Pounds and Aus dollars or US Dollars. The value of money is different in each country based on earning power. I could just as well say that a coke in the UK costs R25. Does that mean it is 5 times more expensive - no, not to people living there.

Also, how does the Mbps/GB/month metric have any useful meaning? Is 384kbps and 100GB the same 'value' to a consumer as 24 Mbps with 1.6GB if both are the same price?

I think a more useful metric would group speed into ranges of <1Mbps, 1-4Mbps and 4+ Mbps with some sort of multiplication factor for each range. Otherwise you get the situation where changes in speed that the average user wouldn't notice, affect the score too much.
 
Gaz{M} said:
This comparison is a bit flawed. You can't compare Rand to Pounds and Aus dollars or US Dollars. The value of money is different in each country based on earning power. I could just as well say that a coke in the UK costs R25. Does that mean it is 5 times more expensive - no, not to people living there.

Also, how does the Mbps/GB/month metric have any useful meaning? Is 384kbps and 100GB the same 'value' to a consumer as 24 Mbps with 1.6GB if both are the same price?

I think a more useful metric would group speed into ranges of <1Mbps, 1-4Mbps and 4+ Mbps with some sort of multiplication factor for each range. Otherwise you get the situation where changes in speed that the average user wouldn't notice, affect the score too much.
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Good points, the comparison is flawed at best.
 
Gaz , yes u correct to a certain extent , but if you should convert that currently into say pounds/Euro's it would paint an even bleaker picture. Take the 8MB uncapped option from BT for R324 , that would be something like £29 !!! Seems even cheaper for me that way.

Anyway , we still paying 40-50 fold more than other countries , I would understand double even triple but 40 times more ?? These articles just make me sad !!
 
Here we go moaning about our lot, but come end of the month we just pay our thousands of rands over to our telecoms providers.
What are we doing about it? What CAN we do about it?
Wait it out and hope that the new SEACOM cable will make things better? Wait for ICASA :erm: to take the consumer's interests at heart and bring down costs...... wait a minute isn't that their missing... I mean mission statement......
Let's DO something about it.
 
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