SA Telecom Insanity

Apologies for not attributing this to the original author - had been a forward of a forward. Australians may complain about average download rates or prices compared to places like Korea - South Africa has things way worse.

Note: by way of comparison, you can get 12Mbit download speeds to the home with 80Gb bandwidth a month for A$120 a month (~R550) - including $30 line rental…. and we complain that things are substandard…:-

We all know that Telkom has ridiculously high telecoms charges -that's no secret. But whenever a comparison is made to other countries, Telkom has a tantrum like a spoilt child stating that it's unfair to compare South Africa to other countries.

I decided to do a little comparison to show how expensive it really is... so here are the results of the investigation. I compared the time and costs involved in downloading 100GB of data over Telkom's fastest ADSL offering (1Mbps) with the time and costs involved in flying to Hong Kong, visiting an Internet cafe,downloading 100GB of data at their fastest speed (1Gbps), and flyingback.

Yep... that's quite a challenge! And here are the details:
TelkomLine speed =3D 1Mbps
Download Size =3D 100GB
Estimated Download Time 9.5 days

ISP (34 x 3GB accounts @ R269) =3D R 9, 146.00
Line Rental (ADSL) =3D R 680.00
Line Rental (Residential Voice) =3D R 92.28
TOTAL =3D R 9,918.28 (AUD ~$2020)

Hong KongLine speed =3D 1Gbps
Download Size =3D 100GB
Estimated Download Time 13 minutes
Flight (SAA) =3D R 7,942.00
Internet Caf=E9 (average cost @ HKD20) =3D R 17.43
TOTAL =3D R 7,959.43 (AUD ~$1620)

Difference: Hong Kong is cheaper by R 1,958.85 (AUD ~$400)

So to sum up... it's cheaper and quicker to fly to Hong Kong if you want to download 100GB of data!I haven't got the time to work out where the two converge, but it justshows how badly we're being ripped off!