Afrihost helping Piracy?
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.