12 responses to “Time flies”

1. 

   Nick

   14 years Ago

   I actually had the (rare) pleasure of being in a location which gave me fast 3G download yesterday and it was quite something … however, usually this theoretical speed bears absolutely no relation to what you can actually get.

   I find it strange that 3G mobile speeds – which themselves rely on cable links – are now faster than what Telkom makes available over ADSL. Esp. as I pay a lot extra for a 4Mb/s line which doesn’t deliver anything like 4Mb/s and Telkom just say “It’s not guaranteed”.

   Seacomm? Revolution in high speed access?? Not yet …

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2. 

   Retief

   14 years Ago

   In 1999, on my first visit to the USA, I worked at a medium sized company in a run-down part of Chicago. There I experienced blazing fast Internet, which was just the sort of usual norm the Americans were used to. Even now, 11 year later, SA is not even vaguely near to what I experienced 11 years ago in the USA. Overseas entry level boradband is 4Mb/s, which is out top level ADSL offering. This is truly pathetic.

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3. 

   Terry Roe

   14 years Ago

   This age of enlightenment, particularly in the field of Computer Technology, is sure something to be marveled at. To comprehend an increase in speed of info transmission of 133 times what it used to be is awesome. Even the speed of light or electrical current flow at 300,000km per second seems quite unbelievable, but is dwarfed by the speed of thought which is simply unimaginable. Try to imagine how fast the answer comes back when we call upon the Lord for His Divine assistance. It’s like being in direct contact with Him 24/7 : and what a great feeling it is when someone knows that He really cares about His kids! – Just a computer-inspired thought I decided to share with anyone who feels unloved and lonely.

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4. 

   Herman

   14 years Ago

   All the adverts for fast internet is lies. I have a 4meg line and never ever ever get anything close to that. Maybe one tenth.

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5. 

   DAVID DICKENS

   14 years Ago

   It only works when Telkom lines are up, which is not all the time 😉

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6. 

   Arthur

   14 years Ago

   I have just come back from 4 weeks in Singapore – where I worked for 6 years before. At two of my friends where I stayed they have got Fibre links (all done by the governemnt) and have 1Gb access (nominally); another friend that I stayed at has a 18Mb link at SGD40/m (about R250) all inclusive – no additional telco charges, and no cap of course!

   One could really understand the meaning of an online system, as the response time is really only limited by the server that you are getting data from … It was bliss.

   Incidentally, low end mobile phone packages come with 12 Gb (yes!) of data included in the bundle …!

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7. 

   Sean

   14 years Ago

   I have two theories about the cost of internet in SA – help me if you think I’m off the mark.

   1) There is a veritable IT desert between SA and Europe – the more BW we can utilise on the current cables all along the route the more we can expect costs to come down and the more competition there will be to lay more cables.

   2) SA’s busines models are skewed to the point of obsessive conservatism and underestimation of the possible user base. The user base can be expanded by a little hard work, a little elbow grease – but we tend to be lazy. To my mind, Asian business models are more beneficial to user base growth – and thus to ISP and comms providers’ pockets. If I take my experience of the Philippines as an example, for several years now, they have offered uncapped private individual at 512Kbps for an equivalent cost of ZAR90pm. At a spending power adjusted base that would be approx ZAR110pm. But the Filipino model was based on “How many and how quickly” users can be added to the ‘net – and then the sales targets and procedures to reach them were set accordingly. The SA model seems to be “How many of our huge and affluent users (who really have no choice) can be used to pay for the line, then how much can we charge individual users in proportion to the huge affluent users, assuming only 640 private users will ever use the internet. But the model is changing. And those changes will benefit us. Our suppliers are realising that in order for us to get to a first world level we need to get there in terms of connectivity.

   A further comment – we are a low-cost skilled country; I saw, first hand, two good outsourcing deals defeated by communications costs in the last 10 years. Both were lost to the Philippines. And both lost solely on telecommunications cost in the business case.

   Regards

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8. 

   Laurie Fialkov

   14 years Ago

   I have been reading these comments with interest. The are two main issues resulting in higher internet costs in South Africa ( other than the fact that you have to pay Telkom for the cost of the copper twice, once for the telephone and once for the adsl line rental)

   The first problem which is not that obvious is that we have very little local content. Most of the USA content is in the USA, you do not see them backhauling traffic from africa 80% of the time or their internet costs would be significantly more expensive than now. Similarly, europe stays within europe mostly because of language as does asia within asia. It is a lot cheaper to trench fibre ( roughly R500 per meter) nationally than to lay a fibre across the ocean.

   The second big problem is that those providers who have good local content will not allow the others Internet providers like ourselves who are big content consumers to peer with them. This means we have to pay to get content even locally and this cost is even more than it costs to get content all the way from across the ocean. Telkom is not the only culprit here, Internet Solutions and MTN have most local content and they charge even more than Telkom does to allow our users access to it.

   Then there is a comment on speed. Speed is a function on how close you are to the server you are fetching from and how contended the service is. Data communications is done over fibre and the speed of light is constant, so assuming you have nobody on the same line as you, getting the same file on a 100Mb/s line from china versus 100Mb/s line from across the room will have a slower response/access time as the signal has to travel thousands of km to china but meters across the room. Once the download starts it should sustain the same speed.

   Finally there is an issue of contention, which is how many times the provider sells the same 1Mb/s worth of bandwidth. ADSL/3G and all consumer services are contended or oversold services. Consumers should really force providers to tell how contended their services are so the consumer can work out how fast the service will be. On a 1:1 ( 1 to 1 ) contention the bandwidth is dedicated to a single customer on a 10:1 contention, the same bandwidth is sold to 10 other customers. Contention effects speed, the higher the contention the more likely someone else is going to be downloading at the same speed as you. In the worst case on a 10:1 contention you get 1/10th of the advertised speed. It is a well advertised fact that the cost of international bandwith is roughly R5000 per Mb/s per month. The cost of local with all the other sundry requirement is the same, so the total cost per Mb/s per month with a 1:1 contention is R10 000.
   Now there is uncapped 384Kb service advertised at around R200 per month. There is roughly 3 x 384Kb in 1Mb/s ,so R200 per month uncapped recovers R600 per Mb per month. Since the ISP is paying roughly R10000, this means the same bandwith must be oversold/contended at 10000/600 ie 16 times just to break even. So adding in profit you are looking at contentions of around 20 for uncapped products, which means in the worst case, speed can be 20 times slower than the advertised speed. With capped services, you know how much the customer can download because the cap is fixed so you can reduce the contention significantly. So adsl/3G services will always be contented and depending on the contention can give you significantly less than the advertised rate.

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9. 

   Lance

   14 years Ago

   Thanks Laurie. At last someone seems to be spelling out the issues. But the fact remains that internet SA is exorbitant and expensive (though getting better on both fronts).

   Perhaps ISPs should be forced to publish the average actual speed attained by their customers. Then we might talk about 10Kb/s, 20KB/s and 40KB/s lines, not 384/512/4096. This will give potential clients something real to compare. Laurie will you propose this at your next ISP meeting?

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   1. 

      Laurie Fialkov

      14 years Ago

      There is yet more confusion here. The line speeds are quoted in kilobits per second and your browser quotes in KiloBytes per second when it downloads. There are 8bits in a byte. So a 384Kb line can only achieve a maximum 384Kb/8= 48Kbytes in your browser. So if you are seen 20Kbyte in your browser and you are on a 384Kb line you are achieving roughly half the advertised speed which is very bad. You should never get less than 75% the advertised speed or you should really look at another ISP.

      I can tell you for certain that no ISP is going to volunteer their actual speeds achieved because actual speeds are always less than advertised speeds and unless legislation forces them to do so. Adsl regulations does force ISPs to publish contention ratios and jitter, so you can demand this from your ISP.

      It really does the consumer a disservice by quoting the telkom adsl line rate, because line rate means nothing unless you know the contentions. Unfortunately, however this is the norm everywhere else in the world also.

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10. 

    Laurie Fialkov

    14 years Ago

    This price price comparable (in fact more expensive than ours). Our 2Gig price, line rental included (adsl2+ , which really does not mean anything, because the specfication includes speeds from 384Kb to 22Mb) is R169 including line rental. To be fair you have to exclude the adsl line rental when comparing bandwidth costs with other countries, because the adsl line rental is charged to us by telkom as mentioned in my very first paragraph it is charged twice.
    Lets look at the cost of the 1Gig which is 7.96. that is almost R50 per gig at todays exchange rate. No ISP in this country has 1Gig prices for shaped bandwidth that high. The 10Gig price works out to be around R240, which is R24 per gig. We have prices as low as R10 per gig for the equivalent cap allocation. You will also notice the scarcity of uncapped products, does that not seem fairly strange since everyone claims that “the rest of the world offers uncapped”

    If you compare Australian prices to what is available in Europe/Asia/Usa you will see they are an order of magnitude more expensive and they are on a par with SA when comparing per Gig prices

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11. 

    Herman

    14 years Ago

    If Laurie’s theories are right, then internet in Australia should be expensive and slow too.

    A quick check on http://www.internetchoice.com.au shows that the smallest package (1GB ADSL2+) costs
    AUS $7.96 (internet)
    + AUS $29.95 (line rental)
    ——–
    AUS $37.91 (= R242)

    + $ 0 (setup )
    + AUS $79 (1 port modem, = R505)

    That’s pretty much that same as in SA.

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