Every time I drive crawl through rush hour traffic, I think of what an 
impact a decent broadband system in SA would make to the economy, with many people being able to work from home. Just yesterday I wrote the following in reply to a UK based customer complaining about our quote for a 2Mbps connection to the UK:
>The cost is approx 6 times what we would pay in the UK > for the same circuit – I know bandwidth can be
> expensive in South Africa but is this the best price
> available or are there any other options?Considering telecoms pricing in general (driven primarily by Telkom's continued monopoly of local loop and international gateway) is acknowledged to be 10x higher than it should be, and that Seacom (due in 2009) are proposing prices of 15x less than Telkom are charging the likes of Storm for IPLC's now, 6x what you're paying in the UK is bloody good! There could conceivably be some crowd prepared to cut their margins to ridiculous levels to better this, but I would not buy from them myself.
>do you have an uncontended 2mb ADSL option?
No such beast in SA. DSL is a contended technology anywhere in the world. The difference being that in places like the UK you can pay more for a "low contention / business" DSL as opposed to a "high contention / consumer" DSL. Here, we're stuck with the "consumer" version where the telco refuse to quote contention ratios.
An here is what my 512kbps DSL line looks like today folks as I write this from my "home office":
ISDN used to give me 64kbps or 128kbps day in and day out. I cannot access my fileserver. I can hardly pull mail.
Telkom's quoted speeds for this line:
Down stream line sync speed minimum 416kbps; maximum 512kbps and up stream: minimum 192kbps; maximum 256kbps.
And the Telkom Product Manager for DSL had the bare faced cheek to tell me (when I suggested he differentiate his products based on contention ratio's) that he was not going to degrade his perfectly good product just to charge less!
Gah! Love to know what parallel world he is living in.
Stumble It!
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