Are SA broadband prices low enough?

South Africa’s government wants all its citizens to have broadband access by 2020, but to date details on how this will be achieved remain sketchy.
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:erm: Promise? lol
 
Let the rich subsidies the poor. And the politicians benefit from the government funded tenders.
 
Almost the same as our matric pass rates. When they could not get the figure up they dropped the standard. In this case the GDP dropped.

In regards to giving everybody broadband by 2020, best of luck. They cannot even get the SABC digital, where the hell are they going to give everybody broadband and most importantly, who do they think is going to pay for it?

The government already wants to up taxes as it cannot manage with is current 'income' so no way they are going to throw million or billions into broadband penetration, at least not 'their' money.
 
To get this right you need to create employment, because as long as more than 50% of our population can't get work, they'll keep stealing cable. I would if I couldn't get a job!

Don't think fibre optic cable is immune to theft, because they're targeting that as well.

The only way I see this becoming feasible is cellular data services.
 
Broadband cost should be compared to median salary, not average salary. Median salary is the middle salary i.e. 50% of the population earns above the median and 50% earns below the median. My guess is that the median salary in SA is way below the average salary. Also, 'entry level broadband' should be defined. I consider 1 Mbps to be a barely adequate definition as broadband.
 
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1geoff99 said:
Broadband cost should be compared to median salary, not average salary.
Click to expand...

Very true, everyone always make use of the average and this is not the right value to be used as it is completely skewed by a very small percentage of high earners.
 
The problem with this article, as previous posters have pointed out, is that it assumes too much. Although the data from STATSSA might not be wrong, why would the information from the informal sector be excluded when it comes to actual comparison time?

From my point of view "average monthly income" should group both sectors together. People from all walks of life in SA are interested in having a broadband connection.
 
According to the Monthly earnings of South Africans 2010 as released by Stats SA - see link and image below:

"Distribution of monthly earnings by status in employment

Table A shows that of the 12,9 million paid workers in the year to September 2010, 11,1 million (or 85,4%)
were employees, while own-account workers and employers accounted for 9,3% and 5,3% of total paid
employment respectively. The median monthly earnings were highest for employers at R7 000, followed by
employees with their median at R2 800, and the lowest median monthly earnings were observed among the
own-account workers at R1 820"

5% of that is R140.00

earnings.png

http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P02112/P021122010.pdf
 
I'll take 5% of 2800 thank you very much. But this articles shows the issue with using stats, they've been manipulated to give a specific outcome become there is less than no chance the avg salary in sa is anywhere close to 13k.
 
Since when is the Telkom CEO a staff writer for MBB ??

( nobody else have such clear reasoning )
 
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Rofl. Writer needs to go back to school. "5% of GDP per capita"... Not some airy fairy thumb suck average salary.

So...
SA GDP per capita: $8070 = R80700 "per year"
Thus yearly cost should be 5% of that = R4035
Divided by 12 months = R336.25 for broadband as defined by the ITU which is anywhere between 1.5mbps and 2mbps (recommended) - And I'm pretty sure that they do not mean capped accounts - I've had one; It's nonsense.
So...
Telkom line rental: R148pm
Telkom Fast ADSL: R165pm
Total: R313 (and then you need to pay for a decent uncapped data package which face it if you do not want to be throttled or shaped to hell and gone is R150-R200)

So all in all you are looking at about R450-500 for a decent entry level deal. Which is R115-R165 more than 5% of SA GDP per capita per month.

Of course the challenge in SA is twofold. We have a nice big shiny middle class population and then a massive low income group. Therefore in my mind it makes sense to go for a 256kbps deal at 2.5% (which could be wifi to enable faster penetration rates no problem), and then a nice shiney 1-2mbps deal at 5%. Also 4mbps really should not be more than 10% - I mean come on... really... Anything more and people will never truly feel they are getting a good deal. And we absolutely need some love at the high end. There has been some tlc on the low end, but internet prices at 4mbps for a premium residential deal has stagnated for going on 3 years now. Actually its just getting more expensive a la Telkom yearly line rental increase for the past 15 years.

The reality though is that in many countries they are completely leapfrogging the ITU recommended broadband speed and going straight for 20mbps to 100mbps through ftth. Oddly even with SA's low GDP per capita manpower costs for local infrastructure development seems to be surprisingly high while the bulk of the work is basically just digging ditches and then covering them. Sure fibre cable and the technical side of it's installation is expensive, but ftth is exploding elsewhere in the world. And I believe that if they want to solve the problem of how to migrate to it then they should look into why it seems to be such a hurdle here and then maybe for once in longer than I care for play straight and just get the job done. There's massive amounts of potential wealth in it for the country. Infrastructure should be fast tracked so that the benefits can be reaped.

They are killing the business. Totally and utterly killing it. Be that as it may... We need affordable internet.
 
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