At last, bandwidth

Free at last! Free at last!

Thank heavens. I've only recently begun to explore the potential of video on the internet for self-study. There are thousands of free lectures from some of the best universities in the world along with millions of how-to's on Youtube.

But thanks to the Telcom, operating on our tax rands, South Africans, and Africans in general, who could benefit more than anyone else from the possibilities of educating themselves, or enhancing their education, through the internet, have insufficient access to take advantage of this small but important avenue to addressing our skills crisis.

How can a state institution, with a mandate from the liberation government, stand so proudly in the way of development, and intellectual liberation?

I find it amazing that everyone is expecting this huge drop in prices. Here is an example exactly what ISP's and such do.

Internet coza domain fees are set by uniformsa at R50.00 including vat per year per domain. Private industry including Mweb and other ISP charge their customers up to R136.00 including Vat. A near 175% markup.

Most SA ISP's offer domain hosting at high prices and add on for usage but they use US servers with terrabyte capability at the RENTAL equilvelant of R2000.00 a month. Profits in excess of 6000% after selling hosting to unwary SA end users.

Telkom sells a split use blended 1gig package at R79.00 per gig. Private industry sells the same at around R160.00 ex vat but you pay for the extra local bandwidth as a sperate.

Now tell me it has always been Telkoms fault.

Access costs - not expected to come down......we are never in Africa going to have it free.

And so SP's, how does the following statement sound?

"We want our money back NOW!"

Now we will finally see that Telkom is not the big skelms...

“Over the next three years there will be a cumulative 75% drop in cost of additional data. However, access costs won't come down dramatically.” - Now isn't that a surprise? I think it is a standard mandate of all companies in SA to screw the consumer wherever possible out of every hard-earned cent we make. No such thing as a 'fair price' in this country!

All it would take to reinvigorate the SA economy is for companies to price things fairly and then I, for one, would be more willing to spend my hard-earned money more freely - as it is I don't, just on principle!

Those commenting that prices won't drop don't understand the very fundamental principles of economics: Higher supply = Lower prices. That's a fact being proven everyday at the JSE. Look what happened when Cell C came into the cellphone market. Prices dropped big time (if you were a cell c customer anyway). Good riddance to telkom, and shame on the government for waiting so long to allow competition into the telecom market. Without you greedy bunch Africa and South Africa specifically could have been a decade ahead in terms of telecommunications and, as a spin off, economically as well. Well written article. I enjoyed and agree with the comments regarding Telkom.

Uhm who belives that? Supply and demand? Free market economy? It is all bull. Look at the motor manufacturing companies in SA, they are seeling a lot less cars per month and instead of dropping car prices (lower demand) they rather make cars more expensive and close stores?

I don't even want to talk about BANKS, TELKOM, DSTV, etc.