What we're missing out on.

S

Strobemeister

Expert Member
Joined
Nov 27, 2003
Messages
1,202
Reaction score
13
Location
Gordons Bay
Just thought i'd let people who haven't experienced a proper ADSL service know what they're missing out on. I signed with Eclipse Internet in january http://www.eclipse.net.uk/ . I paid £27/month with no contract, plus they threw in a free Alcatel Speedtouch 330 usb modem (I remember seeing the same modem on the telkom site a few months ago going for about R2500). British Telecom took about 7 days to activate my line, and i was all go from then on. Initially i got it for online gaming, which worked a treat (30-60 pings on most servers worldwide). Then i started using DC++ for file sharing (220 gigs from jan to june this year - whenever i was at work or sleeping, i was d/loading). Not for one minute in those 6 months did my line drop, no interruptions whatsoever. The only thing that ever happened in those 6 months was that my connection got cheaper (think i was paying £22/month by the time i returned to SA). It got cheaper because of strong competition within the market, a somewhat foreign concept over here it seems. It got cheaper despite being consistently rated the fastest provider in the UK, downloads and uploads, on the ADSL guide website http://www.adslguide.org.uk/ . So i get back here and find that i can get ADSL in South Africa, as long as i've got a truckload of cash, for a service that is not even guarenteed. Plus there's the 3 gig cap thing. Reading back on the news and articles on the telkom site, i realise that i'm probably telkom's worst nightmare, someone who's going to use my bandwidth to the max. But why the hell not. Why does Vipo whatshisname tell us that ADSL in SA is aimed at small to medium business and blokes with loadsadosh. Why not for someone like me? Next week i'm getting an ISDN line installed. That'll be the best option until this mess gets sorted out. It pains me that i'm doing exactly what telkom wants, for people like me to pay by the minute. In the meantime, all my mates over there are moving on to 1 meg lines. Lovely.[}:)]

Telkom - South Africa's Handbrake to progress.
 
In response to your message - some comments about the ISP business when you are at the "edge" of the Internet.

Like it or not, the costs to an ISP are radically different if you are in the UK or in South Africa. In the UK, the bandwidth comes to you. In South Africa you have to reach out 10000kms to fetch it. And pay ALL the costs of that.

Even in the UK you were certainly a loss-making customer, based on any reasonable "cost" for bandwidth. The difference is that in US/Europe the Internet/tech madness resulted in ISPs and Telcos investing 100s of millions of $ in network backbone capacity. The madness nearly killed the companies (or did), but the bandwidth is still built. It sits mostly idle now so they all have stacks spare. So in practice it doesn't really effect them if you suck so much.

For instance - UUNET has more than 10Gbits/sec bandwidth between UK and US. Its loaded less than 15%. Similar multiple STM64 trunks (2.5GBits/sec) go around Europe. So why should they care what you use - there's a glut and no real business customer to buy it anyway.

In South Africa the picture is rather different. It costs real serious money to get bits from here to Europe or US. Real ships must lay real fibre over 1000s of kms under the sea.

I do freely concede that Telkom is being careful to manage bandwidth availability on the SAT cables in order to maintain its value. And I'd argue that they should drop the price. Nevertheless, the capital cost of the cable needs to be repaid with profit or nobody will lay the next one.

So - 220 gigabytes over 6 months - that's 111k bits/sec all the time. How much does that cost? SAT3 price something like R8100 per month assuming you've committed to something like 45Mb/sec total.

On top of that, they must also pay to transit your traffic into the Internet in Europe or the US.

Even if you imagine that Telkom's cost are much much less than they sell at - even 1/10th - you can see that you would cost them much more than they make from you.

Remember that these are costs that European and US ISPs just don't have.

Regards,
Steve Davies
 
Fine, but how come Australia is able to offer their customers the same price as in the Europe/US ?

It seems to me only South Africa is charging a truckload for the little bandwidth we get.

So review your argument about the whole "laying fibre optics for 10000 kms" look at australia who ALSO has to lay cable, and THEIR pricing structure!
 
Thanks Steve, i get your point. It still grates me though. I feel that Telkom could use some of that massive profit to subsidise a decent service at an affordable rate. i realise that my "broadband abuse" over there is never going to happen here, but surely they can do better than the current situation. its not even an option for gaming, most gamers here have reverted back to ISDN, how can that be right? Online gaming is what got me into the IT trade in the beginning. Its a pretty good platform to get the feel for different areas of the industry, and puts you in touch with people round the globe with similar interests. Its a shame that we should be excluded from these communities.

Telkom - South Africa's Handbrake to progress.
 
Steve ... I agree with you in some ways and I understand that the UK has a lot of bandwidth laying about, cause I am currently working for a internet exchange point in the UK and the amount of traffic that passes through our switches is just enormous ...

We peaked just over 30Gbits per second between about 136 UK and International ISPs ...

You can check the stats here : http://stats.linx.net .... just excuse the ups and downs recently , this is due to one of our switches playing up and I haven't had much sleep in the last 24hrs trying to sort it out [:D]

BUT ..... I also think that Telkom is just a bunch of greedy bastards ... have you seen their interim results .. .the amount of money that make is ridiculous ... and they sit back and laugh at us

They CAN afford much more international bandwidth , but toooo greedy and there's nothing in for it them ... damn monopoly [:(!]
 
Hi guys,

Telkom certainly could drop its prices for SAT3 bandwidth. To buy international bandwidth you buy two half-circuits - from SA to a notional point in the middle you buy from Telkom, the other side you buy from an international carrier eg BT, MCI or whatever. Its telling to know that of the total you pay, about 75% goes to Telkom.

My point is simply that "I want to suck on my 512k all month and demand to pay the same as in Europe" just can't happen. Even in the UK such customers are being subsidised based on any real costings.

These are the financial constraints for Telkom. But (und its a big but) - they have destroyed the product in ways that can't be justified in terms of underlying cost constraints.

For me the biggest beef is traffic prioritisation. In terms of my traffic patterns I'm an ideal customer for Telkom, using barely half of the 3GB allocation But the product just doesn't work for many of the purposes I wanted to use it for - its barely dialup speed for everything except a few protocols like HTTP. And the protocols prioritised include things like FTP - which is the standard example of a non-interactive protocol.

Perhaps we should cook up an alternative way for Telkom to manage usage that would be less destructive?

Incidentally, my background is one of the founders of Internet Africa, then to the UK in 1997 where I was ops manager and then Dial/DSL "planning and implementation manager" for a multi-national ISP.

I'm home now and taking a break from things Internet. Its telling that in 1997 Internet usage SA was more advanced than the UK in many respects. Now that certainly isn't the case any more. If Telkom will get out of the way perhaps we can start to innovate in things Internet in SA again.

Regards,
Steve
 
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Its telling that in 1997 Internet usage SA was more advanced than the UK in many respects.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Well thats a telling stat. I don't even know what else to say on this thread. I've given up on ADSL for the moment, and going for ISDN, though i now find it takes them 4-6 weeks for installation, which is not ideal. For me, ADSL is too expensive, too unreliable and this site bears witness to general unhappiness with the product. It concerns me though that i have to lay out cash for hardware and startup etc. when something decent and affordable might b round the corner.

Telkom - South Africa's Handbrake to progress.
 
Ja, its a shame that i now have to settle for less bandwidth and get charged by the minute. Still, as was reeled off on another thread, ISDN 128k plus the R7 jobbie gives an agreeable return for your cash. But it means i'll have to do my work downloads after 7pm which is a bit crappy.
But Steve does make some good points regarding additional costs of hooking us up in SA that telkom has to bear. The problem is, they're not bearing the costs. They're making joe public bear the costs. Which puts into question their committment to bringing high speed internet to the average bloke here. In fact, and this is stating the obvious, they're not committed to it at all. Its a service for those with plenty, and thats it. And it doesn't look like getting better anytime soon. Not as long as telkom is pulling the strings.
We need the kind of committment we see in other countries like Oz & South Korea etc.
But i won't b holding my breath.

Telkom - South Africa's Handbrake to progress.
 
I wouldn't mind the cap so much if only they could split international and local traffic and only let the international traffic contribute to it. Is that too much to ask?

Juice

Telkom - South Africa's Handbrake to progress - I like that! Mind if I use it?
 
Perhaps an option is for Telkom to work there data counter along with such applications provided by http://www.ip-to-location.com/.

As such a 'near time' count of bandwidth could be mapped against IP address and then ip-to-location.

If the IP translates to out of country, then add it to the count, and if not add it to the list of sites visited in South African.

Who knows perhaps one of the marketing companies would pay for such information (provided it did not infringe on privacy laws and commonsence principles), money which could go to upgrading International bandwidth. [:0]

http://www.ip-to-location.com/
 
Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but... at some point in the journey of a packet destined for international addresses, a check is made to see whether that packet comes from a capped customer or not, and it is then handled accordingly. Surely the bandwidth usage tracking could be done at this same point?

mithrandi
 
If only. If you've blown your cap, you get moved to an entirely different network with a pinhole pipe off-shore.

Juice
 
Yes, that's my point. If you can restrict international bandwidth, then you can also track bandwidth usage based on whether it was international or not. Obviously SAIX can do whatever the heck they want, I'm just saying that I don't see why it would be terribly complex to only count international traffic toward the cap.

mithrandi
 
Haha. If there is 'so much bandwidth available over in the UK, quoted at 15% total useage', even if not entirely accurate, means that to PURCHASE INTERNATIONAL BANDWIDTH would be CHEAP right? You could get a nice rate on it, which surely what is happening. Even with the distance and laying of pipes etc, no one can doubt that pockets are getting fat, while my audio stream to my d&b bbc.co.uk urban radio station is getting t h i n n e r.

But to all of those folks, and sorry ot post here 'cos it might work against us (doubt it tho') but I have a british passport, was there in London earning fat cash for 8 years, but after returning wouldn't go back simply for a fat pipe and 24 hours indoors. I'd rather be here in Cape Town!!! If I survive and I'm not bankrupted (!) by greedy businesses - and not just Telkom - the general industries here are greedy. My brother came down for a week from the UK, reckons you can go to many, many countries for hols for cheaper. But then maybe it's lots of factors that hamper our comptitiveness with the 1st world and I'm just not aware of them!

=====================
Fusion.01 : Internet Design & Production
www.fusion01.com
=====================
 
Why does everyone complain about greedy businesses? The primary function of a corporation in free market economics (yes, I am well aware that .za's economy is nowhere near being free market) is essentially to increase shareholder value. Reinterpret shareholder as necessary for the specific situation. The problem is not greedy businesses; the problem is regulatory interference from force-monopolies - ie. the government. If corporations were allowed to compete freely with Telkom, there would be no problems caused by Telkom's "greed". Telkom have a nation-state enforced monopoly; it would be stupid for them not to exploit that for all it's worth.

As far as tourism is concerned, there is a reason why .za is a major tourist destination for activities such as golf...

mithrandi
 
Fusion, i agree with you. After 10 years over there the only thing i miss is decent internet, and thats it. Not running it down or anything, but its "lekker by die see". [:D]
Every day here's a day in paradise. [^]
I think i'm gonna use this thread to report on my ISDN installation. Faxed my order off to Cape Town coupla days ago(you can't send it to your local at Somerset West, its a different division, apparantly). Ok, so now i just wait and hope someone got it, its readable, its not being used to line someones bin, not been sent to telkoms creative dept for paper plane treatment, and if i haven't been installed in 4-6 weeks i'll just fill in another. Lovely. Everythings peachy.

Telkom - South Africa's Handbrake to progress.
 
Errm - not sure where this thread's going, but free market versus a regulated economy is surely moot? MyADSL attempts to focus on issues to do with services currently provided by a regulated institution, which is in any case shortly to be faced with competition, albeit also regulated. Personally I think some regulation (note - *not* total) is necessary, given that free market results in all the downsides of unfettered capitalism, just as total regulation results in all the downsides of unfettered communism. 'Nuff said...
Be all that as it may, perhaps Strobemeister could ask rpm for assistance and appropriate referencing for his ISDN installation...
 
I personally think, despite the downsides of "unfettered capitalism", it is still a superior alternative to any other situation (partial regulation, communism, whatever). Fortunately for me, we now have the mathematical and networking technology necessary to support such an economy, and thus, if I am correct, it is economically inevitable.

mithrandi
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X