What about local?

D

daysleeper

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Telkom’s Steve Lewis said his company would like to see broadband usage become more ubiquitous: “Pricing comes down as more users get on the network. However, we are at the end of Africa and the undersea cable costs money. However, we won’t see prices as low as those in the USA, Europe, Japan and Korea. We know we need broadband to expand the economy and uplift education. It is not Telkom’s intention to have the whole cake.”

Okay, undersea cable costs money and so on and so forth.

This does not explain:

1.) The exhorbitant cost of hosting on SAIX
2.) The need to cap local bandwidth
3.) The poor local quality of service
4.) The poor customer service and fault responses
5.) The lack of customer service agents
6.) The poor product knowlegde of customer service agents
7.) The ADSL disconnections (geographical)
8.) The biling problems that customers encounter.
9.) The inacurate usage tracking
10.) The poor attitude telkom shows to its clients

These problems have nothing to do with the undersea cable. They are part of the expensive service that we have to pay for connectivity.

Does anybody here disagree?
How are more subscribers going to make the service better?
The cost is way out of proportion to the service quality. You should get what you pay for.

Telkom must come up with another excuse!
 
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It's totally bizarre and ass-backwards to put your prices high, then sit around waiting for millions of customers to sign on so that you can then *afterwards* start lowering the prices due to economies of scale. You just can't get economies of scale with exorbitant prices, it's impossible, there's a thing called price/demand elasticity. But we all know it's just one huge BS story/excuse to continue raping ZA, their profits and margins tell a different story, if they wanted economies of scale they would have set their prices much lower a few years ago and they would have had it already by now. But affordable and widespread ADSL and VoIP would threaten the high margins on the leased line and call-charge "cash cows" ... the last thing they want is to unnecessarily compete with themselves and thereby slash margins.
 
The problem is not Telkom, it’s the regulatory environment. If there were alternate ADSL providers then Telkom would be singing a very different story.

My point is you can't blame a business for trying to make as much money as they can. You can however blame the policy makers for allowing this exploitation.
 
Vio said:
The problem is not Telkom, it’s the regulatory environment. If there were alternate ADSL providers then Telkom would be singing a very different story.

My point is you can't blame a business for trying to make as much money as they can. You can however blame the policy makers for allowing this exploitation.
Click to expand...

Your signature states otherwise. :D
 
Well then again personaly I think Steven White is the retard responsible for all our woes
 
Remember!

Remember in 1994, A nokia 2100 or those old brick eriksons used to cost like R6500 right?

Now you can get a motorola for like R300 in 2006.

Should the people who bought phones in 1994 feel ripped off?

Same with ADSL?
 
The Nokia argument only stands up if prices for the same handset were equally high overseas.

Vio believes correctly that it is policy makers who are the problem, this is mostly true, they are making a hash up of everything else so why expect the telecoms to be exempt from their inept damaging touch.

Regardless of policy, Telkom's behavior is not compulsory. They have made a very calculated decision to gouge the public for everything they can, they operate with impunity and they know it. They behave this way not because they need to, profits are pretty much guaranteed as they are the monopoly - they do it because this is how they think.

As for the original questions asked by daysleeper I expect you will get the standard “No comment” answer from Telkom. Telkom would have you believe that local costs are the same as international costs. Despite this bleating over high international costs I am guessing that each gig costs less than a few rand for them. This is logical as we know Telkom always take the cost and then multiply by 10 times to get the customer price, being bandwidth and a much more opaque market I suspect they will inflate the price as much as possible since its fairly hard to compare the prices, 20 times or higher would not be unexpected.

As much as we would all like to have some nice clear answers and reasons for everything, I don’t believe we will ever get these, certainly not from Telkom. The less we know, the more exploitable we are.
 
International connectivity costs

The often quoted high cost of international connectivity due to our geographical distance from the US is also a red herring. If the "actual" costs are really so much more, how is it that countries such as Australia and New Zealand who are even more geographically remote, are able to offer internet access at prices way less than Telkom's prices and without all the excessive bit caps and port shaping.

We shouldn't allow ourselves to be duped by Telkom's smoke and mirrors strategy in this regard. They are ripping off all users of SAT3/SAFE. End of story.
 
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