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Old 20th Dec 2003, 02:15
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Mac the Knife

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Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: Cape Town
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Bit late with my reply...

No idea. Don't use 'em as I said. I think quite a few are pretty amateur as I see them appear and disappear. Maybe they've gone out of business or can't be bothered to maintain their web page - it's mostly casual trade so there's not much incentive to promote a Web presence. I think quite a few have only a few dialup lines and aren't suitable for much more than email and a bit of casual surfing. ISDN is available most places but still quite expensive. ADSL is in it's infancy here, only available in big cities mostly and expensive. ADSL speed is very variable because bandwidth are constrained by the fact that there are relatively few big pipes to the outside world. So don't count on doing much international on-line gaming. TELKOM isn't bad, but it's a governmental monopoly and not particularly flexible or market orientated though it has improved. Talk of second and third providers drags on but probably won't happen. Local POTS charges are quite high here but phone lines are generally good and reliable.

So the short answer is still that I don't know - nevertheless, there are at least 3 active Internet Cafe's within a couple of hundred yards of my house on the edge of central Cape Town on the way to Camps Bay.
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