Bumzilla said:
I'd be happy to pay R500 all inclusive for a 1meg line and 30gig cap. I think that's more than reasonable for a 3rd world country...
Bumzilla, this "oh we're a 3rd world country so it's reasonable to expect it to be expensive" is a myth: If you compare SA's economic stats to other economies where broadband is more reasonably priced, like New Zealand, you'll see we're not as "third world" as you think, and there is no reason why we shouldn't be paying comparable rates ... consider that the population of our "first economy"
alone is larger than the
entire population of New Zealand, and our GDP over
twice the size of their GDP; so broadband can certainly be much cheaper here ... Telkom's profits in fact prove that our economy is more than large enough to generate the capital required (and then some) to fund it at affordable rates. If you buy Telkoms' "oh we're a poor country we should expect rubbish" line then sure, but if you look at the facts and the numbers then you'll see the argument doesn't hold water at all - they're just taking advantage of the average South Africans incorrect perception that our economy is tiny. Poverty and the second economy don't drain anything but a negligible amount of wealth from Telkom; Telkom operates within a well-developed formal economy that is ranked 27th in the world (and 21st when when adjusted for cost of living).
sunsoffun said:
I know that we are in the a-hole of africa down here making international bandwidth expensive. Do you think with these packages that we want, can be sustained on the undersea cables with 1 mil dsl users in SA, let alone the oher traffic that goes through those pipes?
Yes. The full capacity of SAT-3/SAFE combined in theory would allow for over 7,000,000 local ADSL users at 1Mbits/s contended at 30:1 (or over 14,000,000 users at 512Kbits/s). 1,000,000 1Mbit users should easily fit then - less than 15% of capacity - leaving 85% still for all the other traffic - and if many people are on 512Mbit packages then it's even better (and we're totally excluding the 192Kbit/s 'joke' packages here). Also consider that if Telkom had 'only' 1,000,000 ADSL users (the actual potential market in SA is much bigger but let's pretend it's that small) at, say, three to four hundred rand per month (at, say, their current profit margins) then they would literally be able to buy an entire
new 'SAT-3' cable for themselves every three to eight years, easily catering for growth and investing purely out of their profits. And once you approach market saturation, you're just sitting pretty.
The main reason international bandwidth is expensive here is because Telkom as monopoly controls the pricing (creating 'artificial scarcity' on the line) and charges "what the market can bear" - they charge basically retail rates for wholesale access.
