the corner office

I applied for Telkom ADSL today. It's been nearly a year since Telkom released their ADSL service and it's near miraculous that I haven't rushed out and upgraded yet. ISDN beats the pants off analog, but I still had to contend with monster phone bills, slow download speeds, and MWEB's incompetence.

The biggest downer about the ADSL thing, is that Telkom have a 3GB cap on monthly traffic. Even though Ronwen & I moved to Northcliff (with an enabled exchange) from Robindale (whose exchange wasn't enabled) a good 8 months ago, the cap (and laziness) has been the main reason I've been hesitant to rush out and get upgraded -- my work replication could blow 3 gigs in a few days. Most of us laboured under the misapprehension (and I'm sure Telkom didn't mind) that once you'd blown your 3 gigs, your bandwidth was throttled silly, and that was that.

Glad to find out recently, though, that while local and international traffic both count towards the cap, it's only international bandwidth that gets throttled. And that basically boils down to all the naughty folks being lumped onto a separate international link. Local connectivity isn't throttled, and you still get to take your chances that the 'alternative' international link isn't too busy.

Well, I figure that the average, ridiculously slow speeds I'm getting from MWEB can't be any worse.

Telkom's pricing is another thing, of course. ADSL rental is about R680, and another R70-odd is added to that for line rental. Then add about R220 ISP subs. That's well over US $100 for an ADSL connection. Which may or may not be a lot in international terms, but in Big Mac Index terms it's ridiculous. Oh, and let's not forget that this is for a dynamic IP, so you can't use your ADSL line for hosting unless you rely on one of the dyndns workarounds that are cropping up.

Why has Telkom done this? Firstly, the pricing is so high because as a monopoly they can. Diginet, Telkom's hitherto 'leased line' technology is so expensive that ADSL is still relatively cheap in comparison to it. Second, Telkom ADSL is crippled to protect the corporate Diginet market. I'll be paying 800 bucks a month for 512/256K ADSL bandwidth, while your average business is paying around R1500 to Telkom per 64k of Diginet connectivity, with at least R3500 ISP charges on top of that.

Man's propensity for allowing him/herself to be shafted is amazing.