Blogging in South-Africa
Well, actually the title should read: NOT-blogging in South-Africa…
It has been over a week that I wrote a single post for any of my websites. While on a business-trip in South-Africa I had intended to do some on-the-spot blogging. I was amazed to find out that in the internet-market in South-Africa is actually ruled by just 1 provider: Telkom. As there is no mentionable competition, the prices are amazing high, resulting in only few people that have more than a dial-in connection. As I visited 2 companies over there, I found out that for most employees internet-access is even resticted and when available, speed is terribly slow.
Those who DO have a TELKOM ADSL-connection, face some bad restrictions:
- 3 Gigabyte download limit (cap) - local unaffected after that although international is almost unusable
- Local and international upload and download counts towards cap
- Port prioritisation and bandwidth shaping
- Price out of reach of most people
- Dynamic IP
- Bandwidth not guaranteed
- No uptime guarantee - only ‘best effort’
- Limited by distance from local exchange
- With the 4GB unshaped Premium package you are disconnected from the ADSL network when you reach your cap.
In Holland I am used to pick up easily about 8 different wi-fi networks. In South-Africa I did not find any wireless network, not to mention a free one.
Due to the lack of time on beforehand, I had not prepared any posts to be launched on pre-set dates. Pity, but a wise lesson for me not to take for granted that simple and speedy internet-access is available everywhere.
[...] After having posted quite negatively on South Africa’s internet-availability, now it is time to show some respect for those who blog from that beautiful country… The “SA BlogAwards” voting has opened and displays the nice list of nominated blogs. Blogs can compete for the top honours in the following categories: [...]
It’s “South Africa”, by the way
Thanks Coda, will keep that in mind!