I'm busy downloading updates for Windows and Office, and realised that this is actually now a monthly routine (despite me checking once a week out of habit). Now, considering all the issues we South Africans have with Internet access, I was wondering whether the thought had been entertained somewhere at Microsoft SA to host a Windows Update Server within South Africa? The way I see it is this...

Most South Africans cannot afford Telkoms ridiculously overpriced ADSL, or just can't justify spending that kind of money on an Internet connection for home. This means that the vast majority are still using dial-up. Now, let's pretend that they get “optimal speed” from the 56K modem and are downloading at roughly 5KBps (I've yet to hear of anyone averaging higher than this on dial-up). So for these users to download their updates, it would take no less than 46 minutes and 30 seconds (taking the current updates as an example, which are 13,890 KB. Now these are only the Office updates, in case I didn't mention that. They would still need to download the Windows updates.

Ok, and to be truly fair... I doubt everyone on dial-up will be getting their full 5KB when trying to connect to an overseas site. Then there's the issue of dropped lines, or bad quality connections. And the update sites don't support download managers... so if you download 10MB of the 13MB then your line drops... you're stuffed!

Even ADSL users battle, because we're limited to a 3GB cap. Once that cap has been used, that's it... say goodbye to any international bandwidth! Now I never use the full 3GB (in fact, I decided to go for 2GB because I don't need more)... but a LOT of people do.

Surely Microsoft recognises how much this is hampering the local community from updating their products and staying secure (which is what the MS site seems to be drilling into our heads every time we go there)?

Any comments from the MS guys? I think this would be a really useful service to the South Africans that use MS products.

It's a complete joke! The UK has their own update site, when they have gigabits upon gigabits upon more gigabits connecting them to the US for practically nothing. They're paying 30 quid for an 8Mb line, while we're paying the double the equivalent for a 192Kb line!

So where's our update site, I ask!?!?

[UPDATE: New thought]
Another thought just popped into my mind (as unbelievable as it may be). If MS SA is not prepared to spend any money hosting this locally, then why not chat to some of the bigger ISP's in SA and get them to host their own Windows Update Server? This would obviously only be available to their customers, but at least the option would be there. Why not get SAIX, IS, MWeb, Storm, etc. to host a Windows Update Server for their clients? Come on... this won't even cost them anything. A few hours to set it up, and it's DONE!