the corner office

One of the few things from Thabo Mbeki's State of the Nation address which got my interest, was Mbeki's gripe about the cost of South African telecomms being too expensive. As reported by ITWeb:

We believe that the unacceptable situation in which some of our fixed-line rates are 10 times those of developed countries will soon become a thing of the past

I was reading a print article today saying that our ADSL connectivity costs around 15 times more than many developed nations. Even a small, developing island nation like Mauritius has cheaper broadband than we do. So while it's nice to hear our pres say these things, I'm not sure that many people really believe it.

On the one hand it is good news... perhaps our government is really grokking that Telkom is holding the country back. On the other hand, it's hard to reconcile this with the fact that government legislation is what allows Telkom's continued price-gouging, and it's even harder to reconcile this with the fact that liberalisation promises made late last year have been pulled back and scaled down in the past few weeks, limiting the benefits that real competition could bring.

In the meantime, it's business as usual for Telkom.

(PS for a neat summary of the SOTN, head on over to Commentary.)