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Well, at least someone here that understands the method in my madness. I wouldn't know about the 155 number, someone mentioned that it is chargeable and on the Vodacom site it only says that 111, 114 and 082 1959 are free and doesn't mention 1181 as free which is odd since it is.
I agree on the fact that Vodacom themselves never promised free usage and have every right to stop it whenever they wish to do so. But since everyone was using it with Vodacom's knowledge and apparant consent they should at least tell people that it would be closed if they know in advance and apparently they did know.
I am not the only one complaining about data prices here. My point is not to get to an exact figure on how much data delivery costs, but rather to get to a marginally close rounding of how much the different technologies cost to show mainly that Vodacom is making a huge profit on HSDPA, but charges the consumer even more for it, which is unacceptable. They would have you believe that it costs more on the links, but what they are not telling you is that the bigger profit makes up for that. You also don't have all the users using the link at the same time at full speed as falsely shown on this forum. Even if you have 100 users on HSPDA you don't need to use a 100x3.6mbps link. You need 10x3.6mbps at most as it is unlikely that more users would be using the link at exactly the same time and even if this would suddenly double the link would still not be fully utilised as the average speed for a 3.6mbps is unlikely to exceed 1.8mbps in most cases. Vodacom's contention ratio is very likely to be higher than this 10:1 scenario in most cases as cellular data isn't used that much. If the usage is in fact more than this then so is the profit made which makes up for the cost of the faster link. See the point I am trying to make? The problem is that no one seems to understand this basic equation including Vodacom themselves.
Huh....?
Point A needs to get connected to point B. Point A and point B only has a piece of ground to connect them. Now in order for Telkom to connect them they have to lay a pipe and thread a series of fibers through them connected with repeaters. Vodacom now has the right to do this themselves. At some places the link connects to other links which are in use, but Vodacom can still build the new part themselves and then have that connected to the rest of the network until they can replace them with their own network, but for some unknown reason they are not doing this.
I don't see them having much of a choice really. If Vodacom chooses to interface another link with the links they are leasing from Telkom instead of a computer system then what can they do legally. Although they would probably argue that they have a reason for "not being able to do so" and will probably drag it out for some "technical" reason like they drag out the adsl installations. I'm sure this issue had to have come up when Icasa amended the rules to allow them to self-provide as without the right to interface with Telkom's network the right to self-provide would be uttelry useless.
Yes and no. Telkom can spread the cost of their network across clients only where they are using a shared network like with adsl you would be sharing the backhaul links with all users on that same link. When a company leases a link from them it's a different story however. You pay for a link for a certain amount of bandwidth and they have to provide that to you exclusively. They cant tell you that because you are only using 5Mb of a 10Mb connection so they are going to lease out 5Mb to other clients while still charging you for 10Mb. "...but then Telkom may give Vodacom incredibly preferential rates due to Telkom owning half of the company.... who knows....." That's the part that worries me...
I have asked this before. If Telkom can get permission then why can't Vodacom do the same? Right-of-way only delays the process which is probably why it takes Telkom so long to complete the process. But in the end if Telkom can put up a link then Vodacom would also be able to. Besides there are two towers standing on a school ground nearby. Right-of-way didn't stop them from going up.
No one said it would happen overnight. Only that it would be good for Vodacom to make a start as even that would cut some costs and eventually you'll end up with a complete network. If none of the networks wanted to build their own network then why did they ask for the right to do so in the first place instead of telling people that it would be too expensive? Your Neotel example is not complete. They are leasing the infrastructure at cost plus 4% is it not? It makes sense for them to do so rather than build their own network, but I don't believe for a second that they would willingly use Telkom's infrastructure at 1000% more expensive than the rest of the world.
Well, good for them. That has been recovered by the R10/MB Vodacom charged before and the +R50/MB they charged for GPRS before that also helped to contribute towards that few billion as is the hugh profits they are still making from R2/MB. And then there's all the phone calls made every day some of which are on the 3G network and the video calls they charge even more for. The cost calculations were provided by the chairman of the UMTS forum and is the cost for delivering data and not to send it over the air. I doubt that he would make a cost calculation and not take into account the costs of equipment and maintenance which has certainly dropped since April. The biggest cost over time should certainly also be the day to day running costs and not the equipment itself so I don't see how the calculations can be very far off.
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but we are certainly not. 
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