Monopolies at work elsewhere

[PierreLeRiche]

Just to once again refute Telkom's claim that the distance we are from the "rest of the world" is the reason that we have to put up with substandard products and services at grossly inflated prices.

Here's the FAQ page for Eircom's broadband:
http://home.eircom.net/broadband/products/faq

Eircom is Telkom's equivalent in Ireland - also a monopoly. They offer 512K down, 128K up packages for about R450 per month. The cap is set at 4GB (you pay per MB if you go over), and there's no mention of static IP addresses. At least you get the modem for free. It's a better offering than what Telkom decided they would give us (in their infinity generosity), but it's putrid compared to broadband offerings elsewhere in Europe.

Notice that we're talking about a developed country right next to Britain - surely distance cannot be a factor here? The only time telco's can get away with nonsense like this is when there's no competition.

 

[MaD]

<font face="Tahoma">I can tell you one thing, i'm not getting Telkom's horrendous ADSL offering purely based on principle. I'll wait for Sentech or someone who doesn't discriminate against it's users and try to empty their bank accounts just because they know people *need* the service.

I thought about it last night, and don't get me wrong and i'm not being difficult but i think Telkom is discriminating, perhaps even based on race, but definitely on income. They know according to their LSM's that the vast majority of home users will be white people in the suburbs who have some money to blow on a permanent connection. They know no-one in the townships for example can afford ADSL, so they rip off the people who they think <u>can </u>afford it to make up for that. Makes sense to me. The USA, UK, Australia etc. haven't had apartheid abolished recently and have not had any problems progressing forward with their ADSL pricing. Telkom is discriminating indirectly, i am sure of that. <b>We have the most expensive ADSL in the world for Heavens' sake!</b> And there's just no excuse for the lame explanations re the cost of international bandwidth. It's bull. Why can Sentech then offer an UNLIMITED service for a fixed price, and Telkom gives you a cap and then you have to pay even MORE after you reach it? Bull, they want our money, all of it.

Thay're aiming for 300 000 ADSL users - fat f..kin' chance. There's only around 4000 at the moment as i read last week, and if i were one of them i would cancel the ADSL and get a nice 56k modem and R7 call []

We should have stickers printed that we can whip on the Telkom exchange boxes you see all over the place... with that glue one gets on the back of a parking ticket so they won't be able to get it off []</font id="Tahoma">

 

[Solar]

Precisely MaD.. you hit it right on the head there.

Personally I don't have R900 per month to blow on a permanent connection... but seeing that people in the US can get it for about R100 a month, I decided that it's bullsh*t. So now I go about setting up illegal wireless connections, and sharing the price of adsl.. at the moment I pay about R100 a month, and THAT's what this crap from telkom is worth currently.