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by pmjordan 5975 days ago
I'm getting 8Mbit/s down, 768kbit/s up on the outskirts of Vienna, Austria, at €21/month, no limits. In parts of the centre you can get 50Mbit/s fibre for a similar price. Anything faster is niche and expensive.

I recently visited South Africa and noticed that the connection to the rest of the world was really slow. SA-based sites loaded at reasonable speeds, but gmail and such took forever. Is that an actual, real problem, or did I just end up on a connection from a bad ISP? I realise that the physical distance alone introduces lag, but visiting web pages hosted in Australia (pretty much as far as you can get from here) isn't noticeably slower from Europe, you just don't want to play FPS games over that sort of distance.
1 comments
pistoriusp 5974 days ago
This problem usually occurs with shaped accounts. During working hours the connection is shaped, and therefore, cheaper.

The alternative is to pay a lot of money and have a download cap (5GB ~$67 p/m/ 10GB ~$85 p/m).

Right now, on an unshaped account I've got a 200ms ping to google.com; on a shaped account it'll be ~800ms.

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pmjordan 5974 days ago
Wow, interesting. Is Europe-bound traffic really expensive for the ISPs or is this basically just a money-making scheme?

As far as I know there are only 2 major connections out of southern Africa, one all the way just off the west coast to Europe (with a branch to South America) and one through the Indian Ocean to India. I guess that duopoly could easily be used to drive up prices.

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pistoriusp 5974 days ago
It's a money making scheme. We've used to only have a single operator that is 50% owned by the government.

We've finally gotten another operator, but... We're not really holding our breath for cheaper Internet just yet. Maybe... Who knows?

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