Our Handbrake to Progress

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Strobemeister

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Telkom - Our Handbrake to Progress
I've had this as my signature since joining this forum in 2003. Of course, in that time you could label the Dept. of Communication and ICASA with the same title, possibly some leading ISP's.
But now everything's in place, mostly. A wealth of international bandwidth, a great and growing internal network, fibre being laid all over the place. Bold new ISP's entering the market. Possibly the last thing to check off the list is LLU, hopefully by next year.
Yet none of the leading ISP's are offering what most of us want: uncapped adsl at affordable prices. Why not? We all know the answer. There are too many local adsl users who would abuse an uncapped account. Like a baby with a new toy, torrents would be flowing, 24/7. For these people, it's absolutely essential to download every available gigabyte of (mostly)video available on the internet. The fact that they won't watch or listen to most of it is irrelevant. 'I must have Season 3 of How I met your Auntie, it's crucial'. And then we have to brag about how much we've downloaded in a single month on forums like this one.'People must know!'. And if they are ever questioned about the quantity they download, 'Do you know how big a Linux distro is???'. Sure :)
So, if you're guilty of the above, know this: You are currently our biggest 'Handbrake to Progress'. Thanks to you, we have to watch our monthly usage like a hawk. Get a life, really.
 
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Strobemeister said:
Telkom - Our Handbrake to Progress
I've had this as my signature since joining this forum in 2003. Of course, in that time you could label the Dept. of Communication and ICASA with the same title, possibly some leading ISP's.
But now everything's in place, mostly. A wealth of international bandwidth, a great and growing internal network, fibre being laid all over the place. Bold new ISP's entering the market. Possibly the last thing to check off the list is LLU, hopefully by next year.
Yet none of the leading ISP's are offering what most of us want: uncapped adsl at affordable prices. Why not? We all know the answer. There are too many local adsl users who would abuse an uncapped account. Like a baby with a new toy, torrents would be flowing, 24/7. For these people, it's absolutely essential to download every available gigabyte of (mostly)video available on the internet. The fact that they won't watch or listen to most of it is irrelevant. 'I must have Season 3 of How I met your Auntie, it's crucial'. And then we have to brag about how much we've downloaded in a single month on forums like this one.'People must know!'. And if they are ever questioned about the quantity they download, 'Do you know how big a Linux distro is???'. Sure :)
So, if you're guilty of the above, know this: You are currently our biggest 'Handbrake to Progress'. Thanks to you, we have to watch our monthly usage like a hawk. Get a life, really.
Click to expand...

Its only because we have been raped by them for so long.
Can you blame people for wanting to return the favor.

BTW: This does not only happen in south africa, certain ips's in USA are implementing caps for this reason.
 
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Strobemeister said:
Telkom - Our Handbrake to Progress
I've had this as my signature since joining this forum in 2003. Of course, in that time you could label the Dept. of Communication and ICASA with the same title, possibly some leading ISP's.
But now everything's in place, mostly. A wealth of international bandwidth, a great and growing internal network, fibre being laid all over the place. Bold new ISP's entering the market. Possibly the last thing to check off the list is LLU, hopefully by next year.
Yet none of the leading ISP's are offering what most of us want: uncapped adsl at affordable prices. Why not? We all know the answer. There are too many local adsl users who would abuse an uncapped account. Like a baby with a new toy, torrents would be flowing, 24/7. For these people, it's absolutely essential to download every available gigabyte of (mostly)video available on the internet. The fact that they won't watch or listen to most of it is irrelevant. 'I must have Season 3 of How I met your Auntie, it's crucial'. And then we have to brag about how much we've downloaded in a single month on forums like this one.'People must know!'. And if they are ever questioned about the quantity they download, 'Do you know how big a Linux distro is???'. Sure :)
So, if you're guilty of the above, know this: You are currently our biggest 'Handbrake to Progress'. Thanks to you, we have to watch our monthly usage like a hawk. Get a life, really.
Click to expand...

What a crock. The fact that 99% of people who use the internet to download video content do it after hours doesn't register with you? As long as Telkom have no competition our prices will continue to stay at exorbitant prices. Around the world people download 100 times what people in SA do but are their prices as high as ours? Blaming it on the small percentage of users who download large amounts of data is something I would expect from our government and ICASA but the truth is so very different.
 
I have to say that I disagree with this as well.

I don't believe that it's the small percentage of people who would download the world... it's the fact that South Africa still has slow lines, at a high cost, with minimal penetration and an expensive local and international connectivity. I'll try to explain my points in brief as there's a lot more to it.

- Slow lines, means longer to download and in turn more people using the internet at anyone time.
- High line prices lowers the numbers of users (also high bandwidth costs lowers the amount of bandwidth bought by ISPs & companies).
- Minimal last mile penetration the very few people with phone/adsl/wireless/3g still have to pay a lot to keep the infrastructure going/implemented.
- Local bandwidth costs are crazy high.
- As mentioned and due to all the points above there isn't the demand/competition for lots of international bandwidth to drive prices way down.
- Lack of, limiting or too much regulation on different parts at any one time.

As I work with an ISP and am also analysing this marketplace I thought this might help kick off this topic from another viewpoint.

I don't believe that most ISPs are ripping people off.
- Sometimes the suppliers to the ISPs are highly priced to cover their costs.
- Sometimes the suppliers effectively own the market and so over charge because they can or create much higher charges for smaller businesses.
- Sometimes the end customers are not enough to create a competitive supply and demand model across the various sectors to this.
- Sometimes the regulation just creates a bottleneck that no one seems able to fight.
- There are, however, a lot of cases when an ISP just resells another supplier's product at a high margin... then yes... the ISPs are ripping people off as it has absolutely no impact in their infrastructure of network and so they are just holding the market back more.

There is no doubt that if you launch an uncapped product you have to accept, for the first few quarters, the majority of users buying your highly priced product will use the system as much as possible. That's just a contention to profitability model that any new company would have to create when they start in a new market place. Then, as uptake and buying power increases your costs can come down and your contention ratios increase... however you still need the user base to be able to do this in a manner that see a large number of people taking up your offer. Which there isn't because the last mile connectivity still isn't there.

So, despite this not being the view of my business, it is my personal findings from the research and modelling I've been doing for the business. There's still a long way to go in South Africa but there are also a lot of people working hard to try and make changes. So hopefully it'll happen quickly.
 
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I think most people on uncapped download as much as possible in order to justify the outlandish price they are paying. If they were paying around R300 all-in for uncapped internet, there would not be a mad scramble to get "my money's worth"; they would only bother downloading the stuff they really want when they want it.
 
ppedrick said:
There is no doubt that if you launch an uncapped product you have to accept, for the first few quarters, the majority of users buying your highly priced product will use the system as much as possible. That's just a contention to profitability model that any new company would have to create when they start in a new market place. Then, as uptake and buying power increases your costs can come down and your contention ratios increase... however you still need the user base to be able to do this in a manner that see a large number of people taking up your offer.
Click to expand...

Agreed. It will be interesting to see whether the ISPs that currently offer uncapped products will reach this breakeven point.
 
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