Cost of Bandwidth

[alanjohnstone]

Hi All

I know that this is slightly off topic but considering the number of complaints about the high cost of ADSL in this country I thought this might be interesting.

I recently purchased an i-Mate pocket PC - all good and well until I got my cell phone bill - R1,200.00 for GPRS calls alone! I then subscribed to MTN's 15 MB package which does reduce the cost. However if you were to extrapolate this out to the 3GB cap on ADSL your monthly cost would be in the region of R30,000.00!!

Now tell me that the cell phone companies aren't being exploitative?

KInd regards

Alan

 

[James]

lol, R1200 Gprs bill, unlucky. But yes Cell companies are like telkom, they will milk you for as much as they can cause no one can do a damn thing.

There is no peace without war!!!

 

[Tharaxis]

I too have got an i-Mate PocketPC (got it soon after the launch @ Dubai), great phone and PDA, but thank god I'm on prepaid otherwise I would be shafted by GPRS quite nicely.

Yes, the rates on GPRS from our cellular operators are SUBSTANTIALLY over-inflated.

 

[onionpeel]

The reason why GPRS is expensive is that it uses the (scarce) radio network resources.

 

[asmith]

There is nothing scarce about radio waves.

 

[Karnaugh]

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">There is nothing scarce about radio waves.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
The bandwidth on GSM radio waves is as well as the switching time.

- Colin Alston
colin at alston dot za dot org

"Getting traffic shaping right is easy and can be summed up in one word: Dont." -- George Barnett