Neo - I like your definition of nomadic.
And I believe you are quite accurate in you accessment of the situation. I see myself as being somewhere between a nomad and a mobile user.
However I doubt if the wireless ISP's like Sentech and iBurst would agree with you. They tend to think, and imply so in their marketing blurb, that they are just as mobile as the Vodacom and MNT cell systems. But of course they aren't. Sentech's Mywireless is so very far from mobile, it disconnects you if you move from one tower range to another. iBurst is much better, and you get handed over from one tower to another, but it suffers from not enough coverage, so you can also get disconnected quite easily.
Strangely enough, I am in a situation where I have access to both Sentech and iBurst as well as Vodacom 3G (I haven't looked at MTN but I might be there as well), but not ADSL. So overall coverage is not an issue for me. I use the internet for serious business use (not downloading porn or illegal movies) and I need a combination of good speed and a data usage of between 3GB and 10 GB per month, and some mobility as well. (So ADSL is out in any case).
So now I have to look for a service provider to give me this service. And of course there isn't one. I can assure you I would take MTN (I have been a subscriber since the country got cellphones and more years than I care to remember), in a heartbeat if I could, but their pricing for internet data usage of above 1G is just plain crazy. And the speed isn't really something to get overly exited about.
So now I'm stuck with Sentech, that I use for slow but large volume of data (20GB per month for R850), and iBurst for high speed transfer of 1Gb/s. As you probably know neither of these two companies have any clue what customer service or indeed technical competence means, in actual fact, there really should be a law against such companies existing.
So this is why I ask the question, why is there such a large price discrepancy for a wireless internet service between the wireless companies and the cellphone companies, because they are really after the same market. And there also isn't all that much difference in the technologies (iBurst is a dervative of 3G and MyWi is 2.5G). Or perhaps they are only after the very low end of the market (that uses broadband for a little surfing and some email - and to connect their 3G/Edge phones to the internet and send some low res photos to their friends). I believe that to be a very shortsighted approach, because broadband implies applications (e.g. video on demand), that needs high speed and large data usage. When real 3G applications start to hit the market, even the 1GB phone users will find out very soon that this is not even nearly enough.
I accept that a price penalty has to be paid for a better and more mobile system, but a price difference of multiple orders of magnitude is obviously excessive. On the other hand this price penalty only exists for data usage above 1GB. If there is such a price penalty, why not also for data usage below 1GB. All ISP's have to buy their international data from our favourite monopoly, Telkom, so why is the data costs for Vodacom and MNT 10 times more expensive than for the wireless ISP's for higher data volumes. Sorry but this doesn't compute.
Oh, and the flat earth thing, I really don't have any proof right now to say you are right or wrong, but I'll keep an open mind on the subject for now.
