How much broadband bandwidth do you need?

[Megabyte]

Tomorrow you will always need more than you did yesterday.

 

[DefecteD]

Tomorrow you will always need more than you did yesterday.

So true!
But in SA we are all bandwidth starved! - well most of us!

 

[NeonNinja]

And u believe him?

Whether he uses the net only for those stutt, point is this guy can afford 8mbps, because it's so cheap, maybe his children or someone uses it to download movies and stuff. He doesn't want to browse at snails pace, on what here we believe is fast. He doesn't see the point of getting something from 0-7.99mbps, because hell that's so cheap, I'd rather pay 8mbps which is so cheap as well and get better speeds.

 

[Abe]

Anywhere between 10GB and 30GB would work for us.

 

[sallyspencer]

As much as I damn well want.

+2zillion.......

 

[CorneN]

They can give a 1Gb cap for all I care, as long bandwidth prices just come down to an (Internationally) acceptable level. From there I can dictate the size of my cap, which is a variable amount on a month to month basis anyway...

 

[jcorreia]

I would love at least 15 gigs, we have a 5 gig account which we recently upgraded from 384 to 4k and wife was so happy with her fb farmville being so fast that cap was reached on 12th of this month!

 

[DefecteD]

give me as much as you can! ill take it all

 

[Guantanamo]

All caps should be increased times 10 till the end of the year than when WACS goes live all caps should go up 10 on that so if you have 3gigs when WACS goes live you have 300. If you burn more than 500 Gigs a month its time for some sunshine.

Also Telkom needs to make more exchanges connected with atleast FTTC. Instead of laying it in the ground they could also run it on the electricity poles.

Not sure if its a stupid question but with copper if you further than 5km from the exchange you don't get ADSL. Is there a distance limit with fibre?

 

[Shayd]

If you burn more than 500 Gigs a month its time for some sunshine.

ROFL... I would say closer to 100 gigs

 

[I am Penguin]

Oops new Mozilla crashed when I voted? Interesting.

I say Highest speed with no bandwidth limitation 9100% uncapped, Unshaped and Un-throttled will sort itself out! No congestion if the network are fast and sorted!

 

[dabbler]

4 people in this household and we each consume about 3 GB (+3 GBx2) =9GB (thanks Afrihost) ie 27GB per month. A 30 GB account will do me fine.

 

[fusion01]

This article infuriates me with the mention of 'how you're ok or well of if on a 4mb connection'... during the day it's the same as a 384kpbs connection. And I'm one man utilising it. If I have to research via a video clip during working hours, I literally watch a second, video buffers for 5, I watch for another sec, video rebuffers.

It's all bull****. Contention ratios - crappy quality lines blah blah. Point is, if you *don't* need to download at high speeds in the evening, keep with your 384 or 512, cos 4mb has always been a right insult during the day. So what we need is faster, reliable line speeds, and those coming close to what's advertised during working hours.

 

[Guantanamo]

I have never had any speed problems with my line other than when the DSLAM was hit and even that got sorted out in a matter of hours. You either getting throttled, badly, or your line is up to k@k in which case call Telkom 3 times a day.

 

[Shayd]

Personally I would be happy with 50 gigs a month as my cap, this is 10-15gigs more than I use but this would protect me from hitting my cap 99% of the time.

 

[MrGray]

This has got nothing to do with cap but has to do with your physical bandwidth. What I don't understand is why people are not complaining about their upload speed. Its shocking compared to the download link!

+1

The article doesn't mention that due to the asymmetric nature of ADSL you mostly only get 384kbps upload speeds from Telkom which means that for many applications that require two way communication, e.g. teleconferencing, gaming and telecommuting the entire experience is handicapped. You may be getting 4mbps download but if you're doing something that requires that you transmit data as well, your effective rate of communication is limited by the upload speed.

 

[Creag]

I have been trying to get Telkom to upgrade my line speed to 4 Mbps for the past 4 weeks, but do you think Telkom can get a simple upgrade like that sorted? Up until this request their service hadn't been too bad, but now I am starting to question their ability.

 

[fvdbergh]

I'd be as happy as a pig in mud with a 4Mb line and an 8 to 10Gb account for the R389 I currently pay for Do Broadband Level 3.
That would make downloading large files less tedious. I am satisfied with the speed at which I can browse and rarely frequent Youtube.

Agreed. It would be wonderful if the "basic" ADSL package in SA was at least a 10 GB cap international (with separate 30 GB or more local) at 1 Mbps, costing R200 p/m. Sure, lots of people need much more than that, and more expensive packages could cater for them, but I would certainly be happy with such a set-up. Oh, the daydreams ....