Internet in South Africa is expensive. It's still expensive, but in 2002 when I started my first job, anything better than dial-up was REALLY expensive.
The cost was split in two:
Really expensive bandwidth, and less expensive, but still costly, line rental.
My boss' parents lived in a town about 200 kilometers from us. They owned a stationary shop and also happened to have an agreement with a large ISP to store equipment in their
shop. The equipment serviced the dial-up users in the town, and the stationary shop could use the Internet "for free" in exchange.
I figured out that it would be cheaper to get a line all the way from the computer college to the stationary store and simply "borrow" the bandwidth.
Instead of our 64kbit/s we got 320kbit/s for the same price!
I was in Morocco recently with no computers at all in the hotel, let alone wifi. It felt weird in the 21st century looking into their office, only to see a desk with some kind of paper filing system. Not to mention they have to handle all their bookings on paper.
So I went to a net café to do some essential stuff. The computers there were painfully slow, as was their internet connection shared between a number of computers. Pulled my laptop out and turns out there was an open wifi network with a much faster connection. I ended up doing everything on the laptop, but paid the net café anyway on that occasion because there was no where I could use the laptop inconspicuously.
In the end it seemed there were quite a few open wifi networks around in Morocco. I guess they're counting on not many people having laptops.
The cost was split in two:
Really expensive bandwidth, and less expensive, but still costly, line rental.
My boss' parents lived in a town about 200 kilometers from us. They owned a stationary shop and also happened to have an agreement with a large ISP to store equipment in their shop. The equipment serviced the dial-up users in the town, and the stationary shop could use the Internet "for free" in exchange.
I figured out that it would be cheaper to get a line all the way from the computer college to the stationary store and simply "borrow" the bandwidth.
Instead of our 64kbit/s we got 320kbit/s for the same price!