onionpeel said:
Say you rent a line out to users and the capacity of the line is x. Shortly after reaching your 5:1 ration, all 5 users start to download at maximum, reducing the quality of service. You upgrade the line at your own cost
Only problem is that your analogy bears no resemblance to reality. In real life, out of every 20 of a large pool of users, you can predictably expect to have only 1 who downloads
all the time, another 3 to 5 who download "much of the time", and the rest will basically use almost no bandwidth at all. It's a Zipfian distribution, and it's universal i.e. in every country in the world. Broadband companies factor these ratios into their pricing models already, in order to offer a flat rate service (where yes, light users
do subsidise heavy users, as with many other things in life). An overseas monthly ADSL bill for +/- R200
already covers the "abusers", and still with profit to spare for the provider.
Furthermore Telkom ADSL is shaped, so your "non-abusive" Web browsing should be almost negligibly affected by someone else's "abusive" P2P downloading.
The argument (in another msg in this thread) that SAn Internet is more limited because of our "geographic location" is also just Telkom propaganda. If that were a problem, places like Australia and New Zealand wouldn't have far more affordable and faster broadband than us. It's not because our economy can't support it either; South Africa's GDP is 5 times that of New Zealand, while Australia's GDP is only 24% larger than ours. Telkom's profits are in fact further proof that our economy
can support a better broadband infrastructure at pricing and specs in line with international norms. And actually, the international capacity infrastructure is
already there - Telkom have the SAT-3 fiber cable running largely underutilized - the capacity is there, they just aren't using it, to keep prices high (and to prevent having to grow local BW infrastructure accordingly). Telkom could probably double SA's international bandwidth today if they wanted to,
right now - all it would take is one phone call to Spain (IIRC), and a slight lowering of their monthly profits. In fact, a large percentage of South Africa's
local bandwidth capacity is also currently lying unused - another great travesty of DoC policies. Of course, Telkom is also supposed to be investing in upgrading local bandwidth infrastructure too, but it seems they'd rather cut R&D in favour of executive bonuses and shareholder payouts at the expense of long-term growth.
Mad said:
One would think that if local wasn't raped to pieces .. then there may not have been a need to cap local
True; maybe as the SAn ADSL (and dial-up) userbases are growing the local infrastructure is starting to take strain, but Telkom doesn't want to spend any R&D money upgrading it?
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