How much should broadband really cost?

Question

We have seen and heard a lot about how Zimbabwe has now successfully connected to SEACOM underwater fiber. What does that mean for the costs of Internet Access. When can ordinary users expect to reap the benefits of the new connections?

Answer 1

They say that it should cost not more than 5% of your monthly income or GDI

Answer 2

and anonymous there is a lot that goes into the pricing structure of the internet esp here in Zim...1) the landing cost is high because we do not have a sea, what this means is IAPs have to pay for the transport to those respective countries in this case S.A or Mozambique

2) it would help if we had caching servers locally that would so much reduce the international traffic from us..

Answer 3

One of the reason why internet is expensive is that every ISP are trying to link themselves to undersea cable, thats a very big money chewing investment which can take years to get ROI and start floating in the profit land.

Bt can also be a good thing if they can all establish IX(Internet Exchange) centres like Zinx for redundant purposes.

Competition should have started bringing prices down but what seems to be happening is these ISPs are somehow colluding and all drinking from the same greed cup!!

Answer 4

As long as we continue to view and define internet bandwidth in term of the pipe from European and American sources, we are always going to have to bear the cost of transporting that information to our shores. I believe Zimbabwe and Africa at large needs to put more effort in creating more and more locally created and hosted/relevant content which will further make use of our under utilized 3G networks before they become obsolete. I feel Africa continues to cheat itself that in this capitalist 'global village' bandwidth is going to one day compare to that of the western world when we don't own any of it. If I'm not mistaken Telone( a major IAP) connects at 1.2Gbps to Seacom while Google is rolling out a service (google fiber) with speeds of 1Gbps to your house uncapped for only $120 per month.... I feel like crying