When I started my IT career in South Africa the internet situation was pretty horrendous. ADSL/Broadband speeds were 384kbps and you had hard bandwidth caps of ~$7 per gigabyte of traffic on top of your line rental.
Companies and universities could, however, cough up for expensive alternatives, such as a diginet line which the ISP I worked for at the time offered. These guaranteed uptime (which was very appealing as ADSL outages were very common) but you paid a hell of a lot of money per 64kbps of uncapped bandwidth. You were looking at something like $400-$500 a month per 64k for the cheapest support package. And we weren't even the most expensive. There was a law firm that was paying something like $30k a month for their pimped out 2048kbps line.
Thank God things have improved dramatically there in the last decade (at least in terms of internet speeds).
Companies and universities could, however, cough up for expensive alternatives, such as a diginet line which the ISP I worked for at the time offered. These guaranteed uptime (which was very appealing as ADSL outages were very common) but you paid a hell of a lot of money per 64kbps of uncapped bandwidth. You were looking at something like $400-$500 a month per 64k for the cheapest support package. And we weren't even the most expensive. There was a law firm that was paying something like $30k a month for their pimped out 2048kbps line.
Thank God things have improved dramatically there in the last decade (at least in terms of internet speeds).