Faster than Telkom ADSL at a fraction of the cost!

[Dave A]

There is some element of horses for courses here. If you want to move 100KB of info, the pidgeon is going to lose big time. So to some extent the race was not exactly fair.

However, compared to so many other countries, our internet is still in the dark ages. I'd been strongly recommended to watch a 45 minute Matt Cutts video on SEO at a webmasters forum site the other day. After downloading 20MB I only had gotten 15 seconds into the video. It may be an MP3 but it is far from optimised for transmission over the net.

So I bitch about how much bandwidth this is going to chew up, and that it's going to take a day or 2 to download. And everyone there is going "What's your problem? You click - you watch." The concept of slow broadband (and caps) is that foreign to them.

Just goes to show. You don't know how bad the service you're getting is until you've received much better service.

[tec0]

Well the truth is ALL our service providers are in it for the money, and they are making a truck load of money every hour of every day! Fact is we have to pay them or learn to be without the internet. Fact is we as consumers are nothing to them! They know we cannot do business without them so they will just keep on ripping us off till one beautiful day when South African Citizens say no more and do the big turn off!

They will face millions in loses in just a few days and in a month or two they will be begging us to use their services. Sadly this day will never come because you will never get people to say NO for mobile phones and or the internet because it is there companies lifeblood.

However, just maybe your service providers will start to feel guilty and lower their cost but I will probably see extraterrestrials long before that ever happens.

[tec0]

I really don’t see the reason behind upgrading your dialup line to a much more expensive ADSL line if you just want to move 100KB’s worth of data. My perspective as an IT Consultant I would not do that kind of recommendation. Fact is if you want to move 100KB’s worth of data get yourself an EDGE modem and Virgin Mobile.

See the fact is we are paying too much for ADSL as a contract and I don’t see it being worth it if your company has a very small data-print something like 50MB a week. Fact is you will probably transfer data faster via a delivery service if the data is something like 20GB and up. Anything from a Terabyte and up and you will pay too much to download it and it will take a long time.

There is an important lesson here, and I think it has been neglected. Identify your internet needs and structure around it. If it is massif amounts of data start looking for alternatives... and base it on cost.