Folks, now I am livid! Hopping mad. Furious.
I was just faxed a copy of Sentech's response to T da Silva's original complaint. No wonder they kept it from the media. It really sucks. It's 10 pages of ducking and diving! Unfortuntely it's in faxed form, so its going to take a while to type out.
But here's something to wet your appetite:
>>>
To put the complainant's example of speed problems into perspective:
The example given by the complainant is based on zero contention. This implies that there is only one user on the specific allocated piece of bandwidth. Thiswould be similar as to offering a single individual the oportunity to buy one lane on the N1 highway between Pretoria and Johannesburg, for his sole use 24/7/365. In theory, this is possible, but would be extremely costly to the user thereof. In practice, one would not be able to do this. The same principle applies to bandwidth, thus, as the highway is shared between motorists, the bandwidth of a service will be shared as well.
<<<<
/begin rant
What a load of bollocks! What they are advertising is a highway with a speed limit of 128, and several lanes (remember it's broadband). So for most of the time I can travel to Pretoria at 128, but during rush hour it may get congested and I may have to slow down to 60.
What they are <b>providing</b> motorists is a single lane highway with "road under construction" signs all over the place, potholes and detours, so for most of the time I can only travel at 40. On the open bits I may be able to reach 100 at a push. Oh, and did I mention they want me to pay for the theoretical possibility of being able to go at 128, even if I can't ever reach that speed.
Oh, and did I mention that if I make the trip too often I get told I'm making excessive use of the road.
Well, Sentech, listen up: you are going to be told that your "highway" is not a highway any more. It's just a road. And you can't charge such high toll fees without providing a service.
/end rant
<hr noshade size="1">
Donn Edwards <font size="2"><div align="right">
MyWireless: Diva-style reliability, dial-up performance (
or worse)</div id="right"></font id="size2">
<font size="1">“If our government ever goes bad, as sometimes happens in a democracy... As we extrapolate our [surveillance] technologies into the future, if the incumbency has that political advantage over their opposition, then if a bad government ever comes to power, <b>it may be the last government we ever elect</b>.” See http://privacy.4mg.com </font id="size1">
!]
