Is there any hope for the telecoms situation in South Africa?

rpm

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I don’t see any good coming from this as MTN has never been a price competition leader but rather a follower. Neotel doesn’t aim to compete on price with Telkom now, and knowing that they will have a company with a known and proven history of being a price follower, they will have even less worries when it comes to adjusting prices for market pull.

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Nod

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I think Metallica summed it up nicely - "Sad but true".
 

captainwifi

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I don’t see any good coming from this as MTN has never been a price competition leader but rather a follower. Neotel doesn’t aim to compete on price with Telkom now, and knowing that they will have a company with a known and proven history of being a price follower, they will have even less worries when it comes to adjusting prices for market pull.

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No, there is no hope but the reasons are something which nobody around here is actually willing to discuss: Thabo expected white people to subsidize phone lines for black people. I was driving past an economically depressed black area today and saw the kilometers of telephone wire hanging from poles meaning nothing for nobody. The people living here don't have the money and thus Telkom won't give them ADSL - they all use the Cell networks instead of fixed lines. Yet Telkom is forced to maintain the lines by their 30% shareholder the ANC. Mbeki of course realizes by now that he made a massive mistake when he forced whites to fund a multibillion dollar telephone rollout in black areas. This was probably one of the biggest wastage of funds this country has ever seen. Because the whites from Waterkloof, Sandton and Houghton didn't understand the separation between the http://www.npa.gov.za and legislative as explained they actually thought that the ANC could have you criminally prosecuted for refusing to fund this Mbeki folly.

So we now have the unbelievable situation where the ANC as major shareholder forces Telkom to maintain the Fiber optic link between Sabie and Nelspruit at a massive financial loss, instead of the ANC via its Transnet holdings maintaining the Sabie, Nelspruit link. The problem is that should Transnet simply take over these unprofitable functions from Telkom then all the umlungus from Waterkloof and Sandton will throw the bottle out of the cot and also want services for free. There is this slight problem that you can't ringfence your whites form Sandton and Houghton and expect them alone to make Smuts Ngoyama rich while the rest of black South Africa gets bandwidth for free.

Another problem is the massive Vans license holder alliance like Naspers via M-web. They want to sell bandwidth and don't want people to pirate their DSTV content. Now how do you sell something at inflated prices to Sandton but give the same product away for free to the blacks in the rest of the country? Of course you can't do this it will be discriminatory and be shot down in the courts. And thus the whites from Waterkloof are forced to pay 30times more for bandwidth and thus subsidize Mahushu so that the Vans license holders have some legal means of reselling bandwidth. You see for them the issue is having something to resell. This is why Infraco is such a disaster because it will make bandwidth worthless. You can only profitably resell bandwidth to the whites in Waterkloof, Sandton and Houghton - only they have the money and are willing to pay even inflated prices.

The consumer is caught between the Vans license holders on the one hand who's only objective is to resell bandwidth and for this they must control the pipes or make certain that everybody gets their bandwidth via a centralized channel like Telkom - no matter what the cost. And hence their endless ranting against poor old Telkom as though this is Telkom's fault. No, it is Thabo Mbeki's fault and the ANC stooges getting their kickbacks via their 30% shareholding. Telkom is just following the orders from their main shareholder the ANC government.

This whole Telkom thing is a massive racial issue: White people are forced to pay for black people who don't want the Internet. The ANC eventually realized what a huge mistake it was to force Waterkloof to lay copper all over South Africa. The current thinking in the ANC is that the government must actively invest in education, roads, railways , gas lines, harbors, airports and of course Telecoms. And this infrastructure spending must be paid for out of the taxes collected so there is a fair and even distribution of the burden of developing our infrastructure and not the present fiasco where Telkom is forced to maintain the Sabie-Nelspruit fiber link and the bill gets sent to Waterkloof.

Telecoms, a pillar of any country's development have been hijacked by ANC insiders wanting to get rich out of Telkom and of course our Vansies, MTN, Vodacom who don't want the ANC to give everybody free bandwidth because then IS, Mweb, http://www.openweb.co.za won't have anything to sell. Their hysterical ranting against Telkom has nothing to do with feeling sorry for the umhlungu's in Waterkloof meekly paying their Ngoyama-get-rich money every month, no it is because they know that the technology has scaled to such an extent that we can now all build our own DSLAM telephone exchanges for a R1000 and that it is just a matter of time before it actually happens. International bandwidth is expensive and you need at least R100 000/month to be in any position to negotiate.

The battle is really between the ANC get-rich-faction, MTN, Vodacom, VAns and Naspers on the one hand allied against the fragmented,dazed and confused SA consumer who don't understand that the Vans faction wrote their own ECA and are frantically trying to prevent to much bandwidth from the Mbeki/Manual/Erwin faction flooding South-Africa because it will make bandwidth worthless.
 

stoke

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So, 3 players:
- MTN, Voda, VANS, Naspers
- SA Consumer
- Mbeki/Manual/Erwin

All indications are then that we should side with Mbeki/Manual/Erwin then, but ... why does that "side" not side with us?

Too many sides, heppologies.
 

Conspirator

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The Neotel part is the saddest of all. They are not even in the game yet and they already surrendered.
 

DarkDenim

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Hey captainwifi, is it always about blacks vs. whites to you? SA doesn't need racist twarts like you so please emigrate to NZ or AUS. Do you think white people are the only ones paying high bandwidth prices? White people subsidizing blacks? You're a fool that's managed to p1ss me off!
 

captainwifi

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So, 3 players:
- MTN, Voda, VANS, Naspers
- SA Consumer
- Mbeki/Manual/Erwin

All indications are then that we should side with Mbeki/Manual/Erwin then, but ... why does that "side" not side with us?

Erwin can't openly state that he has told councils all over South-Africa to "unofficially" allow people to cut roads and build their own telephone exchanges as was discussed in the other thread at length. SA has two ways things are done "officially" and "unofficially". Wimax is the killer app and what we need to do is test the patience of the NPA by for example building a demo DSLAM exchange linking 80 houses in Soweto and link these houses on the illegal 2.0ghz Wimax frequence. Its just a matter of changeing the crystal in the http://www.beceem.com/products/bcs200.shtml Wimax chipset.

Then we make a video of it and mock Icasa on this forum and see what happens. I just don't personally have the money for this or I would do this tomorrow. The only thing from preventing me from uploading road cutting expeditions to Youtube and posting it here is: money - I don't have any. It all has to do with your risk/reward ratio in deploying illegal Wimax. There are test cases of criminal convictions of people broadcasting on SABC channels where they received a 5year suspended sentence. Your chances of going to jail if you plea-bargain with John Welch is about zero
I think, especially if we have his sympathy. Which means that we just find somebody we can pay R8000/month to take the rap for the illegal Wimax transmitter which he will physically protect 24hours a day. So lets say Icasa arrives with their court order, he just destroys the device: No device, no evidence.

All Icasa would have is a datastream on 2.0ghz which the tokeloshi that escpaped of the pages of The Soweton could have transmitted. What won't work is for every house to have an illegal 2.0ghz Wimax transmitter
because then Icasa would easily be able to get the evidence and prosecute.

This is why DSLAMs are so dangerous to Telkom/Vans/Naspers/MTN/Vodacom because it will specifically allow us to link these blocks of DSLAMd houses via a single easily destroyed Wimax transmitter and make it impossible for Icasa to prove that a specific house transmitted on 2.0ghz. John Welch must have the physical device to prosecute in the same manner that they must have the gun that shot the bullet.

My agenda with DSLAMs is not just road cutting adventures - no it is to unleash the power of http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/WiMax

It is unbelievable that this forum is so opposed to my ideas. DSLAMs combined with illegal WIMAX is the golden technology that we have all been waiting that could transform this countries broadband landscape.
There seems to be some sort self-flaggelation going on here where people actually enjoy paying a R1000/month for bandwidth just so that they can come and complain here, instead of solving the problem.

It can be compared to a stupid farmer complaining about haveing to plow the lands by oxen but refusing to use the tractor standing besides him.
We would laugh at such a farmer and he would obviously be mentally ill.

Forget about the laws and the mindcontrol from Naspers and focus on the technology of Wixam and DSLAM and how they compliment one another and allow us to make asses out of the Icasa/Naspers/Telkom/MTN alliance - the evil beasts who are directly responsable for there being no video cameras catching criminals because then people will use the exact same bandwidth to become their very own broadcasting television network.

Lets take another look at http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/UnmannedAerialVehicles. Why won't the great defender of Afrikaner belange from the "evil ANC" never ever mention the obvious solution that UAVs - a couple of thousand of them will stop the crime? Because once you start broadcasting realtime footage of a UAV tracking a COIN van carrying R10million then how do you prevent somebody from starting their own television service using UAVs as an aerial relay platform? Naspers cares only about Naspers - not Afrikaners. Part of their PR exercise is creating the illusion that they care about people shot dead in their driveways, but they will never dare mention how Wimax on 2.2, 2.3, UAVs, and DSLAMs will create the bandwidth that will enable us to stop the crime within a few months. Yes, South Africa has a crime problem so we are told over and over with mind numbing repetition - but we are never told about the solution, because the solution will eliminate Naspers/MTN/Vodacom grip over the minds of South-Africans who are to stupid to understand that they are directly responsible that 2.2ghz for example will never be licensed for mobile Wimax video surveilance on a UAV.
 
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mercurial

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Kick Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri's a*s out!

She is the biggest idiot and problem standing in our way of improving our broadband infrastructure! She obviously has nothing between her ears!
 

Juice

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She is the biggest idiot and problem standing in our way of improving our broadband infrastructure! She obviously has nothing between her ears!

Not true. Well except for the vacancy between her ears. She may be in charge of the DoC, but Lyndall runs the show, and she is indeed a nasty piece of work.
 

mercurial

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Not true. Well except for the vacancy between her ears. She may be in charge of the DoC, but Lyndall runs the show, and she is indeed a nasty piece of work.

what is wrong with this people? do they not want to improve the conditions in our country and make us globally competitive? they just don't care do they?
 

rwenzori

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do they not want to improve the conditions in our country and make us globally competitive? they just don't care do they?

No and no. It is better that there are no undersea cables than undersea cables that are not "empowahd". It is more important for business to be "empowahd" than for business to create jobs. It is better that everybody starves away by subsistence farming on their own land than the land be in the hands of the wrong race. It is better to eat donuts than stand up and be counted. It is better to talk than to do.
 
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