On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 8:54 PM, Scott Weeks <surfer@mauigateway.com> wrote:
It would be nice to know what those recommendations were...
Excuse the delayed reply from a SA person :) I'm guessing the recommendations were not to use an asymmetrical service for trying to upload large amounts of data. Ironically the company in question has access to MetroFibre ( http://www.durban.gov.za/durban/services/images-and-documentation/metroconne...), but as with most Durban businesses and callcenter mentality in general - they want carrier class upstream for home user money... There is a point to be made that in SA "home user money" can get you a GE port at LoNAP. Still many people don't understand the whole "you get what you pay for" thing, and they expect blazingly fast internet on whatever they buy even if they have 100 users sharing it and all streaming Youtube concurrently. They could of course also use a symmetrical wimax or wifi solution (we have a couple of those now, I use one at my home office). And there are lots of people doing bonded ADSL systems for people who want to scale downstream capacity on the cheap. Not really a monopoly anymore, but there is still a big lack of clue all around (especially with Neotel who currently provision Seacom). It took for example 2 weeks to convince my WiMAX ISP that ATPC was causing my uplink encoding to downgrade to BPSK because the noise floor was too unstable, or the tower was misconfiguration, or something - eventually I had to break into the CPE and fix it myself... So sadly Telkom ADSL still represents the best cost and reliability point for many peoples use. This particular story though was just a cheap publicity stunt that was thwarted by the entire industry as specious.