Hellkom

This page is no longer relevant, as Hellkom is no longer a parody site.

Hellkom
Type of site
Informational
OwnerGregg Stirton
Created byGregg Stirton
URLhellkom.co.za
Alexa rank 189,050 (April 2014)[1]
CommercialNo

Hellkom is an Internet parody site about Telkom, South Africa's telecommunications monopoly. It was started by Gregg Stirton in June 2004 as a protest to the parastatal's excessive pricing for its services. In April 2009, Stirton started a discussion forum named BBLounge (short for broadband lounge) to complement the site. Hellkom and BBLounge communities represent South African telecommunication consumers who want to see South Africa benefit from full liberalisation of the telecommunications sector in South Africa by educating the public and the media.

Statistical, financial and factual information is provided in an effort to educate the South African and international public of the current telecommunication situation in South Africa.

Currently, 1.7 million South Africans have Internet access, from a population of 44 million people. 0.2% of the population have ADSL broadband access. (Source: INTUG)

South African ADSL broadband usage is currently being hampered by the 3 GB monthly traffic limit (equivalent to less than a day of moderately sustained usage, after which access is cut off for the rest of the month), by the cost of the service, and by the heavy port prioritization and bandwidth throttling/traffic shaping of international traffic at exchanges. The reason, speculates the Communications Users Association of South Africa (CUASA), is that incumbent Telkom makes more from leased line solutions than it ever will from providing ADSL. Technical professionals seeking acceptable telecommunications infrastructure to support their work often find emigration an attractive option; in this way Telkom is at least partly responsible for the continuing exodus of much-needed skilled workers.

"The whole country is being hamstrung by Telkom and restrictive legislation. One colonial-style monopoly is manufacturing all the salt and reselling it in limited quantities at restrictive prices." (Source: INTUG)

gollark: No, I mean GitHub Pages works fine so it should be secure.
gollark: GitHub Pages works, so it should be fine.
gollark: CNAME would probably be good enough for most things. People can do HTTPS by using HTTP-based verification as normal.
gollark: Also, I checked via interweb™, and subdomains can use `document.domain` to set their "origin" to the parent domain, so you can't put anything which needs to not be accessible cross-origin-ly on the actual "madefor.cc" domain itself.
gollark: It's *technically* invalid to have a CNAME and TXT record, although some stuff won't care and some providers support a fake ALIAS thing which works like CNAME but without that constraint.

References
  1. "Hellkom.co.za Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2014-04-01.
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