IBurst a vein - Should I come back down to Earth?

Grind my Cogs/Computers

I have been using IBurst for nearly 8 Months now... Is the Love still there? The lure of DSL remains, but will I sell my soul for a third time to Telkom?

My friend and colleague Derek recently updated his spreadsheet which compares the cost of having residential Internet connection in South Africa. In summary, if you take the cost of the modem/router/device and the monthly and once-off costs of maintaining the connection over a 2 year period, IBurst is the winner. That is, if you factor in the bandwidth and the cap of each option into the calculation.

In my case I am only receiving about 50% of my potential bandwidth and another colleague reports that he obtains speeds much higher than 384Kb/s on his 384Kb/s ADSL connection.

So that levels the playing field somewhat for me, but I will NOT support Telkom. This country is fucked-up enough already without people supporting this greedy selfish monopoly any longer. Just look at their ridiculously high profit margin and the telecoms costs compared to other countries. Unfortunately it is not that easy. If it wasn't for my IT background, I probably would have ditched IBurst long ago. For example, nagging problems which I experienced for a month or two were solved by upgrading my modem's firmware. Try and tell that to Joe Average. He doesn't have the money to pay for BobMcSpensive the freelance computer techie to help him out. Joe Average is going to go to Telkom because IBurst won't assist him. Neither the IBurst resellers nor Iburst will even come to your house to see if you have enough signal strength to warrant getting IBurst. I know, I tried.... repeatedly.

In my previous post, there is a headline about a super-fit runner that was dragged underneath a taxi because that taxi was driving where it shouldn't have been. South Africa is that runner and Telkom is one of those taxis. There are many of these taxis... unroadworthy, piloted by greedy cretins, driving on the pavement and overlooked by the authorities.

Unless these taxis are controlled, the runner is doomed, it's simply a matter of time.