Its finally happening – Telkom is starting its rollout of upgrading certain 4Mbps lines to 10Mbps, but it will at first 
focus on metropolitan areas. While the cost stays the same, users can expect big speed increases from their existing lines – but only users who have 4Mbps line speed activated. No good news to customers with slower ADSL lines.
While this is great news, I expected a bit more from Telkom. True, our infrastructure might not support much faster lines yet, but I at least expect Telkom to increase the speeds of its lower end offerings. At present, its lower end 348kbps and 512kbps lines can hardly be considered “broadband” (click here to see how SA stacks up against the rest of the world in terms of internet speed). Despite Telkom’s misleading advertising, SA is still firmly in the stoneage of internet connectivity, with users paying ridiculous prices for slow internet. At present ADSL clients have a choice of 348kbps, 512 kpbs or 4Mbps lines, with the 4Mbps lines getting upgraded to 10Mbps lines eventually. My opinion is that this should at least be 1Mbps, 2Mbps and then finally the 4-10Mbps offering.
At least in the past year things improved with uncapped internet becoming more affordable, and many people have moved to this method of how the internet is supposed to be used. The whole idea of thinking about how much money this youtube video will cost you in bandwidth is a very antiquated idea by world standards. The problem is now that people who might have 10Mbps capable lines will need to pay more to their ISP if they want to stick with uncapped.
At present Mweb has made public that they are working towards a 10Mbps uncapped offering, but pricing is still unavailable.
Now if Telkom can just increase the speeds of their lower end ADSL offerings…
As a commenter on IOL said, it seems its “To hell with peasants with slower lines”.
