4 ms·
Internet in South Africa is expensive. It's still expensive, but in 2002 when I started my first job, anything better than dial-up was REALLY expensive. The co
by pistoriusp 16y ago
Internet in South Africa is expensive. It's still expensive, but in 2002 when I started my first job, anything better than dial-up was REALLY expensive.
The cost was split in two:
Really expensive bandwidth, and less expensive, but still costly, line rental.
My boss' parents lived in a town about 200 kilometers from us. They owned a stationary shop and also happened to have an agreement with a large ISP to store equipment in their
shop. The equipment serviced the dial-up users in the town, and the stationary shop could use the Internet "for free" in exchange.
I figured out that it would be cheaper to get a line all the way from the computer college to the stationary store and simply "borrow" the bandwidth.
Instead of our 64kbit/s we got 320kbit/s for the same price!
- jeza 16y agoI was in Morocco recently with no computers at all in the hotel, let alone wifi. It felt weird in the 21st century looking into their office, only to see a desk with some kind of paper filing system. Not to mention they have to handle all their bookings on paper. So I went to a net café to do some essential stuff. The computers there were painfully slow, as was their internet connection shared between a number of computers. Pulled my laptop out and turns out there was an open wifi network with a much faster connection. I ended up doing everything on the laptop, but paid the net café anyway on that occasion because there was no where I could use the laptop inconspicuously. In the end it seemed there were quite a few open wifi networks around in Morocco. I guess they're counting on not many people having laptops.