If you don't eat or stay over, you could fly to Hong Kong and download 100 gigabytes of data from the Internet, fly back to South Africa and pay less than if you were to download that amount of information using Telkom's ADSL service.
Even taking into account the duration of the return flight, you could be back in South Africa days before you could complete the download here.
This is according to Durban software developer Stuart Gunter, who has posted on an Internet forum the findings of an investigation that show just how internationally uncompetitive Telkom's ADSL service is compared to the rest of the world.
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The findings were posted on the website myadsl.co.za, an informal online community that acts as a watchdog of Internet access services in South Africa.
"A couple of guys at work always found ADSL particularly expensive, especially with people having family overseas who can access the Internet at such cheap prices," Gunter said.
He said he had thought that it would probably be cheaper to fly to Hong Kong to download data off the Internet than it would be to use Telkom's services. He then did his maths and posted the findings.
Gunter compared the time and cost involved to download 100 gigabytes of data over Telkom's fastest ADSL service (one megabyte per second) with the time and cost it would take to fly to Hong Kong, visit an Internet cafe, download 100 gigabytes of data at their fastest speed (one gigabyte per second) and fly back to South Africa.
The result was that it would be faster and cheaper to download the information in Hong Kong, including the cost of air fare.
In just 13 minutes for a cost of R17,43 (HK$20) the data could be downloaded in Hong Kong compared to a download time of 9,5 days and a cost of R9 146 for 34 of Telkom's three gigabyte accounts - to which ADSL line rental at R680 and residential voice line rental at R92,28 must still be added.
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