The local ISPs are forever complaining that their bottleneck is the fiber running to the US and UK, but why is it that local bandwidth is so slow and expensive?

We have always had a history here of artificially created scarcity, which I can only conclude comes down to the fact that service providers (once they reach a certain size) end up with the type of employees that don’t actually want the burden of supporting more users. So they simply do a poor job to discourage potential customers.

The ISPs doing uncapped are “advertising” no throttling but they don’t tell you that the your amount of data you DL is not throttled but it is in fact your speed when you reach a certain about of GB downloaded….

If there’s anything that ISPA should rule on, it’s the _speeds_ that are considered “broadband”. People love pointing out that 384k (and even 512k) can’t be considered true broadband. Setting rules on minimum linespeeds and excessive use throttling could probably be the most useful thing ISPA does at this point.

And yes, great article. It’s good to see more level-headed discussion, and less diva whining.

~ Wogan

There’s a reason Telkom haven’t offered uncapped yet, perhaps they’ve realised that this would come up and are working on something else.