acidic - 1:03 pm on Jul 13, 2004 (gmt 0)

Those of you who are familiar with South Africa will know that we have a less than perfect economy. It is sad that in an economy such as ours, our government has still knowingly legalized the monopoly of one telecommunications company, giving them exclusive control over both digital and analogue communication until at least around 2010. It's because of this we are forced into paying obscenely high bandwidth prices.

I am currently using ADSL, which is the only really affordable option at the equivalent of US$155 per month. This gives me a shared 512 Kb line (shared with +-250 other ADSL users) and a 3 GB per month cap. If I where to get the line that my business needs to run efficiently (a 128 Kb dedicated line) I would be paying in excess of US$1600 per month.

I would really like to gauge how high our bandwidth prices really are so, my question is: What do you pay for your broadband connection? Does anyone pay higher prices than there? I'd especially like to hear from users in Australia. One of our telecoms excuses for our high bandwidth in our geographical distance from USA and Europe but anyone with a map can see that Australia is just as far away from these hubs.

[edited for spelling]

[edited by: acidic at 2:03 pm (utc) on July 13, 2004]