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SAIX Local-Only ADSL?

I just saw an ad in Gmail for Axxess DSL for prices starting at R15 per GB of traffic. This seemed too good to be true so I thought I should investigate.

It appears that they were talking about their local-only deals which is what I suspected. This does not help the average person much I guess so the advertisement could be a bit misleading (although not incorrect). However, what caught my attention was that it would appear that they are providing this access through SAIX, an interesting new move as I thought it was only Internet Solutions and Verizon that were providing this up to now.

For a 10 GB account, I would rather go for OpenWeb's Internet Solutions deal at R69 per month. However, if you need less than that, you can buy anything between 1 and 4 GB for cheaper at Axxess.

I believe that you can still use Internet Solutions' SMTP server after you're capped; not so with SAIX it seems. But then again, who wants to use SAIX's SMTP server anyway? Your mail could get filtered as spam as they are frequently blacklisted internationally.

Axxess' international offerings also do not look too bad. If you look at their prepaid and pay as you go offerings you pay about R69 per GB. However, even with prepaid, you don't really win when you buy in bulk. Their 200 GB offering at R13 999,00 is more than R69 * 200.

(Please note I am not affiliated; this is just an independent review.)

7 Comments

Comment by Jaap on Wednesday, September 19, 2007 12:57:00 PM

rand to euro conversion is pretty easy... just divide by 10.

Comment by Charl van Niekerk on Wednesday, September 19, 2007 1:37:00 PM

Hi Jaap, Yes indeed it is! Over here you'll find most things are comparably very cheap, but definitely not bandwidth, that's for sure.

Comment by Jonathan Carter on Wednesday, September 19, 2007 7:28:00 PM

I quite like Webafrica's IS Local bundles.

For R130 a month, you get 30GB local traffic... and it even lets through some international (Facebook and Google works fine, for example):

http://www.webafrica.co.za/adsl/is_local/

Comment by Charl van Niekerk on Wednesday, September 19, 2007 7:52:00 PM

OpenWeb has a similar deal for R130 but I don't know about Google and Facebook being allowed through. They have OpenBrowse though that allows a lot of those sites but it costs extra.

Comment by Jaap on Wednesday, September 19, 2007 8:23:00 PM

Very expensive indeed, next time I'll try to finish my comments but a colleague was lurking over my shoulder while I was typing it...

I don't know any other country that has an internet situation as unique as South Africa.

I think it's somewhat comparable to what the Dutch internet provider 'Het Net' did back in around 1997. Only a selection of sites was available free of charge (well dail up costs). If you wanted the real net you had to pay.

I would imagine things like this kinda take out the fun of surfing the web. Do you guys monitor your bandwidth usage franticly? Also does unused bandwidth carry over to the next month? I find this all fascinating.

Comment by Charl van Niekerk on Tuesday, September 25, 2007 11:39:00 PM

Frankly I find it sick. These deranged morons need to be banned out of South Africa (and the entire planet Earth for that matter - they are welcome to go stay on Pluto and overcharge the Plutonians - I'm sure nobody here will mind).

Comment by Messy on Monday, October 01, 2007 11:19:00 AM

I have been using Axxess for the past 7 years with no problems. First they hosted our company website then supplied us with a dialup account. Last year got ADSL from them with no problems at all. Plus they also offer 24 / 7 support.