I hadn’t fully appreciated just how undeveloped the internet would be in South Africa. All internet connections down here are all bandwidth capped. Bandwidth costs about 70 rand per Gb. That’s about $10 USD per Gb.

Let me put that in perspective. A movie is around 700Mb (at the quality I download them), so that movie costs me around $7 to download. On the other hand, I can rent a DVD from the local store for 10 rand, which is about $1.50 USD.

Suddenly piracy takes on a whole new cost vs benefit equation. It’s cheaper to rent a damned DVD than to download it.

When Fedora 9 comes out, it’ll cost me around $50 USD to download. That’s just crazy. Still, the beer is cheap and plentiful, so I suppose it’s all just a matter of balance!