The speed of broadband services worldwide is increasing rapidly with the upgrade to fibre-based broadband from technologies like ADSL and cable modems. Fibre subscriptions now comprise 10% of all broadband connections in the OECD regions, and fibre has become the dominant connection technology in South Korea and Japan.<\/p>\n
Some of the residential fibre-based broadband offerings in Asia provide speeds as high as 1 Gbps. These services are typically uncapped which means that a significant amount of content can be downloaded per month.<\/p>\n
The multitude of available content on the Internet – combined with services like BitTorrent and Limewire which makes sharing and downloading content easy – means that an interesting problem emerged: the cost of storing the content has become a costly affair. <\/p>\n
If a user downloads content at a constant speed of 8 Mbps for a full month he will accumulate over 2.5 TB of data during the month. With 1 TB hard disk drives (HDD) retailing for around R 900, the cost for storing this downloaded content can exceed R 2 000 per month.<\/p>\n
At a cost of R 900 for a 1 TB HDD, the cost per storage space on the drive is around 88c per GB. In the international broadband market where high speed uncapped broadband connections are commonplace the cost of 1 GB of Internet bandwidth is typically cheaper than the cost of 1 GB of storage space.<\/p>\n
In South Africa the situation however looks very different. The cost of ADSL bandwidth in South Africa generally ranges between R 50 per GB and R 70 per GB – many times higher than the cost of HDD based storage space. Storage space is in fact a negligible expense when compared with Internet bandwidth pricing, something which is easy to see when looking at local hosting packages.<\/p>\n
The price for bandwidth in South Africa is in fact so high that it is cheaper to purchase a DVD than pirate an uncompressed version of a movie or TV series using ADSL bandwidth. Unsurprisingly South Africans often share content by travelling around with mobile storage solutions in preference of sharing it online.<\/p>\n