The Free Bandwidth Campaign believes local bandwidth should be free as it was before November 2005. Telkom claims its network cannot support the traffic of all ADSL users who are entitled to free local bandwidth, however the FBC disagrees.

Users are asked to download a small application that will start downloading content from local websites for 5 minutes at a specific time on the 30th of June 2007.
“It will put Telkom’s network to the test and prove whether or not Telkom can meet the needs of the people it is supposed to serve. It will throw open to the world the capacity and capability of Telkom’s network with results which will be collected and published.”

Optimistic efforts by a disgruntled community, exploited by an abusive telecoms monopoly. Unfortunately like many good intentions, there is no way that such an endeavor could succeed. The plan is riddled with obvious flaws:

• There is no way that a significant percentage of the 200 000 ADSL subscribers could be organized in such a short amount of time to deliver intelligible results. The discussion thread on myadsl received 2,697 views in total, less than the amount of ADSL lines Telkom adds every month.
• Telkom will be unphazed by such an attempt, even an effective run would only result in large hosting bills for the targeted website owners.
• Participants will effectively form part of a distributed denial of service attack, even though there are multiple targets.
• Gaining user trust in this way will make it easier for malicious users to distribute malware under the guise of a similar campaign.
• Telkom's excuse for non-free local bandwidth has nothing to do with network capacity, but rather their inability to seperate local from international traffic from an accounting perspective. (which is bullshit anyway)

The FBC ultimately wants to prove that Telkom is lying. Even if they succeed, an obvious point would have been proven. Telkom is obligated by its share holders to maximize profits without regard to the South African public, and will not be swayed in its ways. Even though the FBC website owner put R15 000 on the line for a developer to implement his idea, there is yet a program to be released.

Fortunately, South Africans are on the verge of a communications revolution, with exciting developments such as the planned Cape Town fibre network, Neotel entering the consumer market, the introduction of Infraco, and other consumer-friendly services following adoption of the new Electronic Communications act coming into effect recently.