Wish you were here

C

cyrus

New Member
Joined
Jan 3, 2005
Messages
1
Reaction score
0
I'm currently visiting some family in Guildford, Surrey, England. My cousin wanted to get broadband. So I searched and found a service from Bulldog ADSL. Listen to this: 1Mbit/s UNCAPPED for a measily £30 a month!!! He obviously immediately ordered. Oh, before I forget, the ethernet router is £70. I'm returning to SA soon... i'm gonna miss being in a country that actually knows what broadband is, has heavy competition AND according to the Guiness World Records has the most internet users and has an average transfer of 500gb/s!!!!!

Cheers all!!!!
 
Wish you were here 2

I worked in Cape Town before and had ADSL installed at work so that we could download patches, etc on a project and know the frustraion of slow lines and the blasted idiotic 3GB cap, only a beaurocrat could of thought of that. Since March I have been working in Seoul and we have broadband as a standard in our apartments and downloads regularly run at more than 1,000kb/sec, no cap. All branch connections to head office where I work are broadband as well. South Korea has the highest per capita broadband penetration, apparently, so its nice to live in a 1st world Internet society. Funny thing is they are sometimes quite backwards on other things we Sefafricans take for granted, like proper DHCP/DNS setups in the company where I work - run around manually updating IP addresses in host files on PCs all the time, weird. Their Internet development, allthough all in Korean, seems quite good.

The South African 3GB cap is a real joke and just an attempt to keep people on their over-priced leased/diginet lines. Read the following comments in a recent article on Sabcnews:
---------------
According to Telkom's product development executive, Steven White, price comparisons with other countries need to be seen in context, where ADSL is significantly cheaper it is as a direct result of local market conditions, such as demographics, size and maturity of the market and government subsidies enabling a far more cost effective broadband network rollout.

“In SA we don't have these privileges. These markets (typically Asian) exist mainly on local content and have little requirement for expensive international bandwidth, whereas 60% of SA's broadband traffic is international, making this a huge cost driver,” says White.

He says the business market is responsible for the majority of ADSL growth because they are spending less on their ADSL service than on previously billed call units to connect to the Internet.

“To state that Telkom is hampering growth with price is in fact exactly the opposite of what is happening – businesses are financially better off once they become an ADSL customer, and Telkom has not increased the price of ADSL access since its introduction in August 2002.”
--------------

What a bunch of baloney about Asian international usage, he should be in politics where the masses believe this type of tripe! Anyone got his email? Asian companies access overseas bandwidth most probably more than SA. They live on MSN. We download our patches and software from the same US sites as South Africa. One gets spoilt when you download a whole CD in 10 minutes from US sites. You quite often go into pubs and they just stream their music straight off the net. Broadband is as common as having a cell phone (called handphone or 'handepone' in Korea). Telkom are whining becasue they loose revenue with ADSL, as proven by his comments about ADSL business use growing.

Do miss the beach and mountain in Gordons Bay though and braaivleis, rugby, boerewors and Chevrolet.......
 
"Since March I have been working in Seoul and we have broadband as a standard in our apartments and downloads regularly run at more than 1,000kb/sec, no cap."

Totally different scenario dude.

Most South Koreans live like ants on top of each other in huge apartment blocks in Seoul and other few big cities and hence is it very easy and cheap for them to be wired up.

The rural areas outside of their big cities ain't so lucky.

And there is also the small matter of their economics vs ours.

We on the other hand live spread out in various towns and suburbs driving up the cost of connectivity.

"These markets (typically Asian) exist mainly on local content and have little requirement for expensive international bandwidth"

He does have a point though ... most Korean gamers plays locally developed and hosted online games from NCSoft like Linage and also Starcraft all hosted by local servers.

Also most international content is in English ... me thinks that most folks from non English countries would prefer surfing local content in their home language ???.
 
Dear Tibby.Dude, your surname is dude, not mine, so your dad and your brothers and sisters are dudes but I am not a dude.

Of course I know how Koreans live as I live here at the moment and know the economics of population density, that's not the issue, the issue is the 3GB cap which has nothing to do with points per square km. International bandwidth is expensive but is paid for by number of subscribers which you get more of if there is no cap and the price is reasonable, simple economics. My complaint is that Telkom are short sighted, they seem to want to preserve their Diginet/leased line base which is charged for at a premium while still trying to dabble with newer technologies as evidenced by the quote in the piece:
'He says the business market is responsible for the majority of ADSL growth because they are spending less on their ADSL service than on previously billed call units to connect to the Internet'

The gaming and local contents market is huge here because of fast ADSL but the international business market must be quite substantial too here and INHO not an excuse for the cap in SA. They all have huge Oracle databases and other stuff like corporates in SA do that require downloads of software and patches, the infernal Windows Update being one of them, my Korean colleague's laptop still connects to microsoft.com for that, something that every gamer PC does from time to time too. The ERP software I work on is only supplied by download and we download these here from sites in the US. I had to download a 700mb patch from Oracle which is a super busy site this morning and it took about 30 minutes at just over 400KB/sec from the US, not too shabby International bandwidth, me thinks.

I remember sitting in a pub in the Korean platteland, if there is something like that when the country has a population density of 400 per square km, and they were streaming MP3s of the Net on the PC in the bar, their jukebox.

There seems to be no regard for the fact that as a developing country the better our technologies the faster we develop specially if these are availalbe at reasonable prices.
 
petermax said:
The South African 3GB cap is a real joke and just an attempt to keep people on their over-priced leased/diginet lines.
Click to expand...

I totally agree with you, in fact I have mentioned it on this forum a few months ago.

The 3GB cap is merely insurance for existing services, After all why would someone pay R7500 per month for 64K(CIR). Even with existing ADSL pricing you would see businesses making the jump.
 
“To state that Telkom is hampering growth with price is in fact exactly the opposite of what is happening – businesses are financially better off once they become an ADSL customer, and Telkom has not increased the price of ADSL access since its introduction in August 2002.”

shouldnt old tecnology get cheaper ?
 
Well I have to interject here. I'm a network admin for a fairly large company and we do everything possible to save international bandwidth. EG we don't use windows update we have a SUS server on our domain. Our bandwidth bill is > R50k per month.
 
Well, I went to Taiwan last month, and in comparison.. a 2Mbit/s ADSL line < R100 a month, with free installation and modem. It's even cheaper than the 56k here (concider the telephone bill) !!!! after I came back I was in such a pain working on the ADSL here.

From what I heard (Please correct if I am wrong), Taiwan have abt 4 or 5 internation lines going out to US and Europe and Japn, that provide enough international bandwith. And if Telkom is welling to spend a BIT of the HUGE profit they make through all these years on international bandwith, we should be able to have a fast enough ADSL access and maybe a better price as well ?

P.S. ADSL in Taiwan have be introduced about 4 or 5 years+ ago already.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X