Afrihost is one of the cheapest ADSL bandwidth suppliers at the moment. I signed up for it as soon as I heard about it, and was surely not disappointed. At the time it was a lot cheaper than any other offerings and the speed was good as well. This has sparked a price war in the ADSL arena with various ISP now starting to offer a lot cheaper packages.
It occured to me today that Afrihost is perhaps encouraging piracy indirectly in two ways:
1. People that might already have been partaking in pirating by downloading from places like Mininova and ThePirateBay could get encouraged to download even more now due to cheaper bandwidth prices
2. People that never downloaded pirated software or movies will start doing it because it has now become cheaper to download (R41.30) a 700MB movie than going to watch the movie (R25.00 excl. VAT popcorn + cooldrink + petrol)
Either way, more people will be pirating. This is not Afrihost’s fault obviously, but it did make me think why piracy can be such a big problem in other countries. Sure, our country downloads it’s fare share of pirated movies, tv shows and software, but at the end of the day we’re very limited because of high bandwidth costs. Other countries with virtually limitless bandwidth obviously download pirated wares a LOT more than we do. Cheaper bandwidth = more piracy.
Good or bad, thank you to Afrihost for getting us one step closer to affordable bandwidth in South Africa.
Is it just me or do I seem to be using more bandwidth with Afrihost than with my previous provider?
And NO, my downloading and surfing habits have NOT changed at all, in fact I am using my 3G card more than ever as well?
I used to use 5 gigabytes in just over a month – I now reach my cap three quarters of the way through the month.
Can’t say I’ve noticed it, but I am now running more things from our servers here in the office. So my usage has definitely increased. I run ntop on our gateway server and the bandwidth we use according to ntop and Afrihost are pretty much the same.
I have ADSL accounts with Axxess, Afrihost, TelkomSA and Iburst. I switch between them for various testing reasons. Whenever I’m on Afrihost the speed is definitely noticeably faster. I can also have more concurrent downloads without it affecting my speed as much as it does with other accounts. Whatever they’ve done it works!
Hi Chris
I fully agree that due to cheap bandwidth abroad, it definitely affects your online habits.
I recently took part in the WebAfrica trial (they’re building their own 1st-Tier network) where they gave away 10Gb international bandwidth for free, as well as a 200Gb local only account which had to be used in a specific timeframe. Since you had no choice, you had to use all the bandwidth before the trial end date, or lose the bandwidth.
This effectively created a scenario where I experienced bandwidth usage the way people do abroad (with their cheap prices and sometimes unlimited downloads).
Suddenly I could watch live streaming video without worrying about the cost. Yes, I would still do all the same things I did before but now I could do so much more. Previously I wouldn’t dare watch a Sky News live video stream online for longer than a few minutes since it would obviously eat up my bandwidth in hours. Well guess what, suddenly I had a live video streaming window open 24/7.
I’ve watched more YouTube vids in a week than I normally do in a year. Didn’t matter. Needless to say, my download manager was very busy as well. There are so many online services that can only be fully utilised if you have ample bandwidth.
As for your comments about Afrihost, yes they offer very cheap bandwidth and I have an account with them as well. They’re resellers for Internet Solutions.
I have prepaid accounts with several ISP’s and that in itself is proof that we as South Africans are bandwidth HUNGRY. I’ll shop around all the time to see who has what special going on and buy the cheapest bandwidth I can find, avoiding any longterm contracts. If you had to tell someone in the USA or UK how many ISP accounts people have here, they’ll think we’re nuts. There is no need for them to even go down that road.
The true competition for cheap broadband in South Africa will start when the SEACOM undersea cable gets proper competition. The Eassy cable is due in 2010 and the WACS cable is due in mid 2011. The latter will provide even more bandwidth than the SEACOM cable and will ensure proper redundancy for ISP’s. Telkom is busy trialling 8Mbps ADSL in certain suburbs so with all this happening, we can expect a broadband landscape in SA that will look quite different by the end of 2011.
Easy solution: Lower the prices of DVD’s, CD’s etc. and make it available. But as it is now, if my choice is ordering a CD from Amazaon, waiting 3 weeks and paying something like R180 for it or downloading it in about 2 hours. Guess what I am going to do. But I can tell you, if the CD was available in the local shop and the price was R45, I most probably would have bought it.
Same for movies. If the movie is released in the US and I really want to see it but locally it will only be in the movies in 3 months time and then the DVD will only be in local shops another 2 months after that – and then at R250 – I will find out what Amazon will charge me for the DVD. (Three weeks and about R180.)
And guess what I will do if I then see a good quality rip (700MB) is available online.