What Internet?

Hi all,

Sorry that it has been so long since my last post. I have been a busy woman!

I am writing this full of frustrations. I just want to clarify right now, before I start to rant, that I do love South Africa. There are many wonderful things about this country. I will get into the good things another time, right now I want to talk about what needs to be changed.

First off, the internet here sucks. The entire system is ridiculous and unfair. The way you purchase Internet in South Africa is by megabytes or gigabytes. It is very expensive. You have to purchase it through a telephone company. The company I choose to purchase from is called Vodacom, which is a cellular company. I believe that there are only 3, yes 3, different cellular phone companies here. Not much competition. In order to make the internet work, I had to purchase a special USB stick that holds a SIM card. I then had to purchase a SIM card. After I bought a new SIM card I had to buy the amount of megabytes I wanted. Being that I don't have credit in South Africa, I cannot purchase a year contract with monthly plans. This is unfortunate because it would have saved me a tremendous amount of money. If I could purchase the yearly contract, I would have gotten a free USB stick-SIM card holder. Instead I had to buy one for $1,399 Rand which is around $200 US dollars. YIKES! I then purchased one gigabyte of internet access. This cost about $300 rand or $35 US dollars. This gigabyte supposedly was meant to last a month. Let me tell you how long it took me to use it all...... 7 HOURS!!!!!! I am still in shock over this.

I do not understand how companies can charge per gigabyte. It is insane, it doesn't make sense. Why are you only allowed to download a certain amount of things before being penalized? I miss the vast, great, FREE internet access in the US. I mean, it isn't really free. But it certainly isn't restricted. UGH.

The reason why companies are getting away with this is because a lot of people here are uneducated and do not understand how the internet works. They don't understand that they should not be paying per megabyte, but per month for a plan that allows unrestricted access. I am so frustrated by this that I am planning on writing in to local newspapers to make people aware of how they are being manipulated and used by companies. These companies need to change, and it all starts with public awareness to the problem. If my work Visa is denied it is because I went on an internet rampage.. but I don't care. Someone has to be the first to step up and address the problem. Let it be a stereotypical loud-mouthed American.