Now I think I could have probably argued the law was on my side and I hadn't broken any of it, however this wasn't about the law, it was about courtesy. It was made clear to me exactly how much of Telkom's money I benefit from and that is why in my last entry on the issue I wrote:

This makes me a bit of a hypocrite with a touch of ungrateful whelp.

I acknowledge the benefit I have received from Telkom and am very grateful for it. In particular I had a great time at SATNAC and would like to thank the relevant people for both organising it and paying for it.

However, this does not mean I cannot make fair comment against, what I believe, are Telkom's unethical business practices or my honest opinion of the SATNAC conference, and no individual or institution has said I can't. Telkom aren't the Bolsheviks and I'm not Trotsky, in our democracy I do not need Stalin's permission to criticise 'the Party'. I make these comments in the vain hope that somehow something might change, mostly I hope public opinion will eventually get through to Telkom, ICASA or our government. To me (I am not a lawyer), fair comment essentially means that there is no need for me to be nasty and well reasoned arguments with references backing them up are preferable.

In that vain, I contacted Genesis Analytics to get hold of their report entitled Telecommunication prices in South Africa: An international peer group comparison. It is supposedly available on their webpage, but I couldn't find it anywhere (neither could Google). Hellkom has a copy but I wasn't sure if I was allowed to make it available, but the people at Genesis assured me I can. Here's a snip from their executive summary (I have highlighted the good bits):

At least four previous reports have raised concerns about South Africa's telecommunications pricing structure. In the area of fixed line services, Telkom is a fairly lightly regulated monopoly. Monopolies, by definition, almost always set prices higher than the competitive benchmark, so there is a prima facie case to be made that Telkom has an incentive to sustain a high price structure. However, the pricing evidence presented by previous reports has been to some extent conflicting, and the selection of an international peer group in these reports has not been conducted specifically with the intention of providing a good comparison to South Africa. This report therefore seeks to address this issue.

Most importantly, the purpose of comparative studies such as this one is to assess how close to or how far from the competitive, or best practice, price benchmark South Africa is. There is no innate reason why South Africans should not have access to telecommunications services at that benchmark price level. Thus the approach used in this study is to compare South Africa to a best-practice peer group.

On business ADSL, despite the fact that a number of the international products sampled had a substantially higher product specification than the Telkom ADSL offering, South Africa was the most expensive broadband of all fifteen countries sampled, and was in fact more than nine times as expensive as the cheapest country surveyed. On domestic leased lines, on the data available, South Africa was the most expensive of twelve countries surveyed (100% more expensive than the average price sampled, and almost fifteen times more expensive than the cheapest country surveyed). The most startling price comparison though was on international leased lines, where South African prices are almost three times as high as the next most expensive country sampled, and 31 times more expensive than the cheapest country (out of ten countries, excluding Canada). International leased lines allow business to transport data and voice communications out of South Africa. The cost of international leased lines thus affects the cost of the internet, private data networks and Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) to business.

A simple back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that there is a lot of room to decrease international bandwidth prices as they currently stand, without endangering Telkom's return on investment. The total initial investment on the undersea cable was US$650 million, which Telkom was only partially liable for. At an annual price of approximately US$0.3 million per 2mbps line, Telkom would need to sell about 2 200 2mbps private lines, or about 11% of total line capacity of 40Gbs, to cover the total initial investment of US$650 million in only one year.

The entire report is a gripping read that left me quite angry. This has a real effect on our economies development. We have all sorts of project trying to get machines out to schools and train teachers. There is the translate.org project trying to port interfaces and software over to our eleven official languages. There is a move to make cheap machines available to enable new businesses. We could end up greatly benefiting from following India's call center model, or skilling up our school kids in all sorts of software, from development to administrative. However all of this gets hamstrung by the ridiculous bandwidth and connectivity situation in this country which immediately excludes the majority of this country from participating in any sort of online collaboration. Whether it is access to reference material for teaching, creating South African music and software or collaborating in new and exciting ways: none of it is going to happen.

Now, I am a johhny-come-lately to this game and my peers (particularly Ingrid) actually know much more about the situation than I do. In addition, things have moved on a bit and Telkom has cut it's prices somewhat. For the latest news MyADSL and Ingrid's blog are a good place to start.

In summary, thanks for the solidarity e-mail and messages guys and girls, but this isn't the right fight, the real fight is to bring some sense to our telecoms industry.