South African Bandwidth

[ptpare]

>Marius Bock wrote:
>> John
>>
>> Bandwidth in South Africa is basically controlled by a monopolistic
>> telecommunications company called Telkom.  The people in SA that has
>> Internet and that is a small % do it via dial-up (56K analog or 64K
>> ISDN).  We do have ADSL but it is very expensive -- start from 192Kb up
>> to 1024Kb with line rental cost of $40 to $101.  On top of this you have
>> to pay around $30 for 3GB bandwidth.  When you have used your 3GB of
>> bandwidth you basically get cut of from the Internet.
>>
>> I have read somewhere that one of the reasons Mark (sabdfl) gave for
>> moving to London was the situation recarding bandwidth and telecoms in
>> SA -- correct me if I am wrong here Mark.
>>
>> To get an better idea about the situation visit
>> http://www.myadsl.co.za/, also have a look at the forums on that site.
>>
>> Marius
>>
On 10/9/2005, "john levin" <john at technolalia.org> wrote:

>Thanks for the information.
>
>In this context, I see that the cds and freedom toaster are especially
>important.
>
>John
>

Fortunatley the University of Pretoria does have a toaster because for
broadband access to the internet, departments are charged R2.00 (US$ 0.31
)  per megabyte during office hours and R1.00 (US$0.16)per megabyte in
the evenings and
over weekends. One can sometimes ask the IT department to mirror certain
sites  and then at least academic departments don't pay anything for
the internal
bandwidth used. Many Linux distributions are mirrored at ftp.up.ac.za and
the
Open Office mirror seems to be updated very reguarly.

Unfortunately it is only the Ubuntu ISOs that are mirrored and so one can
not
use apt-get to update or upgrade ones system without incurring these high
bandwidth costs. If all the repositories  could be available on a DVD
from a
toaster this would make things considerably easier. Also if the software
on the
toasters were regularly updated by satellite links, then this would be
another
way of people being able to stay up to date.  Of course the questions
remains as to who would authorise, maintain and pay for such a link.

For private internet use, GPRS access on cell phones has come down in
price
considerably and we now pay US$ 0.31 per megabyte on the Vodacom network.
This makes it comparable in price and performance to dial up access via
the Telkom company and an ISP. The problem then is having to send ones
email via a web based email program as neither the University nor many
ISP's will, for security reasons, allow one to send mail from outside
via their SMTP

Phillip