The US doesn't have anything to contend with (or worry about really) in terms of broadband... In SA our monopoly-provider, Telkom, advertises "blazing fast Internet" at a lowely 384kbps... And anything after that comes at an exorbitant price (don't forget we're capped here - so their "cheapest offering" only really includes 1GB international and I think around 10GB local-only). While there's a new wave of competition in the access-to-bandwidth arena (Telkom still charges around R70 a GB while you can get it from most other places at around R10-R25 /GB) you really can see just how badly we're affected by it. Oh yeah, and we have to pay for an analog line - even if we're not going to actually connect it to a phone. Interestingly enough, I've looked at one of our mobile providers, Cell C - and their HSDPA is actually fairly good priced when you factor in things. Its about time - really wish ICASA would get onto Telkom's case and regulate them further...

Its rather upsetting listening to the local news radio stations on how they're often catching the poachers... far too late. Every week there's a new story about them. *sigh*.

Ung, I for one thing this is a complete waste of time. Coming from a low-bandwidth high-cost for services country (South Africa), I can just see the fun that will ensue when my MP3 collection want' to update itself. Its not bad enough the amount of bandwidth I have to use on running application updates, but now having to update my MP3 collection too... No thanks. Guess it's time to convert everything to ogg!

Surely the firewalls and censorship that happens in China kind of defeats the purpose of faster connections between the Far East and the USA?

Weirdly enough, the only advertising I've seen is from online sources - and none of them from RSA. I kept seeing things like District 9 on Twitter and a couple other places, but in terms of advertising in side of South Africa itself... I think it's been pretty poorly advertised. *sigh*. Oh well, at least now people won't think we have lions wandering the streets, and that we have electricity and running water and all those other things that the rest of the world rarely considers us having...

I for one, welcome faster Internet. Here in South Africa we're lagging so far behind the rest of the planet, its quite rediculous. I hear from my friends overseas that they're being upgraded to 50mb/s lines - usually for free as a part of their service provider upgrading their infrastructure - we're still struggling on under 1mb/s lines - and at a price that is so high (when you look at the cost of the service and the availability of income - the Internet isn't something that is cheap). Heck, even if you look at the price overseas and factor in the exchange rate, its still cheaper to access the Internet oversea's than it is here (and you get far more for your money's worth). *sigh*. If only our Government wasn't so corrupt and inefficient, maybe we wouldn't be so far behind the rest of the world.