AfriHost uncapped ADSL here soon

Let me just add a point I have left out ... I do see infrastructure on the brink, slow speeds etc, but eventually, people WILL get over it, the download happy South African will go to bed after a month or two, but now, everyone has uncapped... Normality returns..
 
agreed boramk, but that 2 months is more likely to be 6 months, and several ISP's may not be able to sustain the flow that long.

I suggest a massive reeducation campain sponserd by the ISPA and maybe MyBB.

I will persobnaly spread the word to the many who ask me for advise in the PUB or in my bussiness dealings, but a national campain is needed to make this transision work.

One thing is for sure, at the risk of breaking my own analogy, MWeb have opend the flood gates and there is no turning back :)
 
caroper said:
Can you Imagine if everyone left there taps open just becouse they have access to the dam, unlimited water would be rationed very fast. Unfortunately Telkom started with rationing so now every one thinks that the dam is overflowing.

Best thing is that South Africans are reeducated to use the internet freely, as they need it, and to not use it to the maxjust because they can.
At that point we can to stop differentiating over line speeds and then go Uncapped.

Telkom has created a leaching culture problem that will take a long time to overcome.
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Nice post!

And it is 100% true. Ask any South African who has lived in the UK what he did online all the time. Downloaded like a mofo because he felt like he needed to make up for lost time. A lot of South African's are going to experience this. Download as much as possible, it might end tomorrow kind of mentality. A lot of South African's also know about not wasting what precious little we have, so now the pantry door has been unlocked, we are taking everything! Instinct is kicking in to not waste it! However, at these prices, I believe levelheadedness may eventually come about.
 
BTW, comparing bandwidth to a commodity like water (or cars or roads), to me, is a bit daft. Bandwidth is infinite, unlike water, petrol, cars or roads.

The size of the ISP's (hose) pipe is finite (to an extent) ;)
 
Not really Acid, water is a good comparison, cars and roads have to be manufactured but water is abundant in the universe.

Potable water, however, is hard to find and what we have we are abusing.

The same will happen with Broadband Uncapped if we don't do something about it.
In deed in the northern hemisphere even politicians consider broadband access to be a utility like water and electricity.
 
AcidRaZor said:
BTW, comparing bandwidth to a commodity like water (or cars or roads), to me, is a bit daft. Bandwidth is infinite, unlike water, petrol, cars or roads.

The size of the ISP's (hose) pipe is finite (to an extent) ;)
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Simply not true. Bandwidth is not infinite. Let's do a quick sum - in this sum I will assume the entire capacity of the cable is available to South Africa (it's not) and there is no overhead.

Capacity: SAT-3: 120 Gb/s , SAFE: 130 Gb/s , SEACOM: 100 Gb/s --- Total Capacity: 350 Gb/s
Gigabytes available per second: 350 Gigabits / 8 = 43.75 GB/s
Gigabytes avaialble per minute: 43.75 GB/s * 60 = 2625 GB/m
Gigabytes available per hour: 2625 GB/s * 60 = 157500 GB/h
Gigabytes available per day: 157500 GB/s * 24 = 3780000 GB/day
Gigabytes available per month : 3780000 GB/s * 30 = 113400000 GB/month
Gigabytes per capita per month: 113400000 GB/s / 45, 000, 000 = 2.52 GB per person per month

So assuming South Africa had all the bandwidth on those cables AND they manage to use it evenly (without spikes and or lows) we have at MOST 2.52 GB per person per month available. No if we only take the internet using population we have at MOST 25.2 GB / person/ month ... and this is a highly theoretical number. This is the super upper limit at the moment. Of course the real limit is lower (due to various stuff I just mentioned) but also because a lot of bandwidth is used for other applications that has nothing to do with consumer ADSL (e.g. research, company data interchange, SA hosted content accessed from overseas) etc.

This by the way not only that affects us here. Network engineers have to jump through insane hoops to work around bottlenecks in the backhaul networks. Google bought a bunch of dark fiber routes, all the big players distribute data centers to to minimize bandwidth and power cost, companies like Akamai helps companies push content as far as possible to the edges of networks.

Of course .. I think we are pretty close to having more affordable internet, and for some users at least the experience of "uncapped". But no way that there is enough bandwidth to have everybody download hundreds of gigabytes per month.
 
Lightscribe said:
WA wake up please...Data transfer speeds and web page sizes are increasing daily...!!!
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Personally I think the damage is done. No matter what Web Africa do, people already know and will have a bad perception of them.

We all see Webafrica, as resistant, slow to change, over priced but really lack initiative and are not innovative.

The hosting and bandwidth providers, the big players, like Hetzner, Afrihost, Mweb, they bending over backwards to keep a captive audience.

Obviously WA will play catch up. They have too, but I think it will be to little, and to late. I dont for see myself using them again. I could never be with a company that does not pass on cost savings to their customers, but really lack innovation.

my 2c.
 
Flojo said:
Personally I think the damage is done. No matter what Web Africa do, people already know and will have a bad perception of them.

We all see Webafrica, as resistant, slow to change, over priced but really lack initiative and are not innovative.

The hosting and bandwidth providers, the big players, like Hetzner, Afrihost, Mweb, they bending over backwards to keep a captive audience.

Obviously WA will play catch up. They have too, but I think it will be to little, and to late. I dont for see myself using them again. I could never be with a company that does not pass on cost savings to their customers, but really lack innovation.

my 2c.
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Haha.. this is funny. Because a week ago, people would have said the same thing about MWeb! And now geeks are going nuts about them!

WebAfrica have the opportunity to surprise us still. Or maybe they pull the rabbit out of the hat with being first to negotiate a deal with Telkom regarding the voice line rental. Or just maybe they can hit a niche with capped (but high capped) product, cheaper than everybody in that niche, with additional services (e.g. WAGE, backup). E.g. their promotion "Complete 7" 16GB + 4MB/s line for R500/month is still a super good deal for me... 16GB/month would essentially be uncapped for my purpose and at R500/month it is R399/month cheaper than the MWeb 4MB/s option. And I must say .. that for our connection at the office, none of these new packages everybody is raving has really offered us a real decrease in terms of money spent on bandwidth - and if it is true for us, it is probably true for a lot a businesses.

One way or another... not everybody will survive this war, and it would be very difficult to predict the survivors now. Remember... in the end, they are all at Telkom's mercy still.
 
It could just be the other way around. These uncapped packages are probably going to cost the ISP's a tidy sum in the beginning as the heavy users are going to go on them first. You may find one or two of the so called innovators end up in deep trouble.
 
The fight for uncapped has been won, now the fight will move to speed.
 
Why is everyone just going after WA. Surely Axxess, while they were good in the beginning, were resisting change and is in fact today still one of the mos expensive ISP's when it comes to data bundle packages?
 
There is a big difference between consumer and business products.

Consumer ADSL products is aimed at 1 to 5 users, whilst business ADSL products, although more expensive, is aimed at small to large businesses. Business ADSL products usually have static IP's depending on the ISP - this is to enable said business to run their own email server(s), whilst home/consumer ADSL only have dynamic IP's.
 
boramk said:
Thing is though... The more we support Afrihost, the more money they get, the more they can invest in infrastructure, and its only better for us.. All in all, the bets thing we can do is for EVERYONE to go uncapped..
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Tats not a good enough reason to support AH.
After all, all the major players are going to have uncapped packages soon.

But price is becoming less relevant. I wouldn't make my decision over R50 or even R100.

Once the price battle settles down then we start to focus on other factors
a) Download speeds actually achieved, local and international
b) Free hotspot minutes like MWeb
c) Support including 24X7 telephone support like WA
d) Good Customer Portals like WA and AH (and others I am sure)
e) Bundled Products - maybe combined hosting / Web Apps / ISP
f) what else?

As for the negative feeling toward WA, well this amuses me.
Sometime ago WA were the in thing and MWeb were poison. Then AH did a gamechanger and WA failed to respond and WA joined Mweb on the ****list. Now Mweb have done another gamechanger. Some people are still suspicious of them (the T&Cs posts etc.) but most are very happy. So MWeb are off the ****list.

The decent companies will change and adapt. The less decent ones won't. It isn't essential that a company change immediately but they have not got years. 3-6 months at the outside pref sooner.

If WA fail to adapt then they will fail but that applies to all companies
 
Johand said:
Simply not true. Bandwidth is not infinite.
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Yes! Think about it guys - what happens when you have downloaded the entire internet?! Nothing left for anyone else! What then - have you thought about THAT??!
 
Mweb jumped the gun with their offer, they're not pioneers nor saviours. Seriously, what has Mweb done for you other than be the most expensive ISP for the last couple of years? Is loyalty so cheap these days?
Now is the time to keep supporting Afrihost and not jump ship to the devil.. otherwise we might just end up with a future where all the small guys had to close doors since they couldn't sustain the uncapped service and Telkom/Mweb monopolizing the interwebs... :sick:

Everyone laughing at the concerns that this game is spinning out of control and becoming unsustainable should start thinking with their brains and not just their pockets.
 
I won't switch to mweb though if afrihost has a better offer, I like how easy I can manage my account, with mweb you may need to use the phone more it seems. But for now I'm happy with my 30GB WA, I also prefer WA's account interface.

Also I'm still not comfortable with the brand Mweb, they created a monopoly with dialup and escalated prices, they could easily do it again.
 
Conack said:
Mweb jumped the gun with their offer, they're not pioneers nor saviours. Seriously, what has Mweb done for you other than be the most expensive ISP for the last couple of years? Is loyalty so cheap these days?
Now is the time to keep supporting Afrihost and not jump ship to the devil.. otherwise we might just end up with a future where all the small guys had to close doors since they couldn't sustain the uncapped service and Telkom/Mweb monopolizing the interwebs... :sick:

Everyone laughing at the concerns that this game is spinning out of control and becoming unsustainable should start thinking with their brains and not just their pockets.
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WTF? I will use who ever gives me the best deal! You reckon people should stay loyal to Webafrica's R59 per GB offering or Afrihost's R29 per Gb while they can get a better deal at Mweb/Telkom/Vox/Openweb ect ect. Good luck with that. I'm switching to who ever got the best deal.
 
I am happy with Afrihost, especially their service, and will be upgrading to that 4MB uncapped when they ready.

These guys have started the revolution! Good one.
 
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