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I'm not really sure where you are going with this. Did you read my last message? I wrote about a team in a place without broadband. Not a company not signing up for broadband because of bean counting, but a team living and working in a place without broadband access available. Believe it or not, this is reality, no matter what any telecom statistics say. Fact is that the major part of Brazil is without broadband Internet access. Overall broadband adoption rates are nice, but did you care to look at the details? At the absolute figures? Like percent of territory covered? I'm currently looking for a new place, and since broadband is a must for me, the possible places are /severely/ restricted, even in the state of Sao Paulo, which has the best infrastructure of all Brazilian states. It's not like just moving somewhere and calling the local provider to hook you up. If you need it, you need to carefully check where it is available. Even in cities where it is available in principle, it is not available in all neighborhoods. Look at a state with less infrastructure, and there are many, and things get a bit easier. It's just not there, outside of maybe the state capital. So where are you going with this? No need to use dial-up in Brazil? What would one do in one of the many places without broadband access? Relocate, of course. But people may have other reasons, besides work, to live where they live. Break-even point? Break even with what? Direct satellite link? That breaks the numbers before it breaks even, even for a mid-sized team. Same for a T1 line in many places. You are talking very generically. I don't say that there are no places where your math applies -- there probably are many --, but you seem to say that it applies everywhere. I know for a fact that there are /many/ places where my "math" applies. And for working with teams in those places, mirrored repositories (to get back to the topic) may make sense, for the scenario I described. Or not? And why not if not? What is the alternative (besides, of course, not working with people who don't have broadband access)? Tony Hoyle wrote: > Actually flat rate dialup is quite rare (used to work in telecoms so I > used to be able to run comparisons of these kinds of things.. at one > point I could have given you the break even point for Brazil down to the > nearest second :) ) Not sure what you call "rare" (I think flat rate is the norm in the USA, at least it was for a long time) and whether that's relevant, but currently there is in many places of Brazil a flat rate of around 100 BRL/month for a phone line plus 24/7 dial-up Internet access. > ADSL, Cable, etc. are normally flat rate so the maths work out the same - > above a certain usage (quite low normally) you're better off with a > broadband connection. Where it exists, yes (except for the above mentioned flat rate, of course, but then, of course, where it is available one gets it even if it's more expensive). But what if there is no broadband available to work out the math? > Brazil has one of the fastest broadband adoption rates in the world, > btw. so it's hardly a backwater... Rates are not a good measurement for status, and no statistic helps you if you're on the wrong side of the numbers. 3 M subscribers (which is residential plus commercial) out of 170 M population total. Only available in major urban areas, and in the one or two densest populated states also in smaller urban areas. The rest (the major part) of the country is on dial-up. Statistics about Brazil are usually not easy to read, for one thing because a large part of the economic activity happens in the Greater Sao Paulo area, with some 25+ M people, which is of course an urban area with a pretty good infrastructure, and is not typical at all for the remaining 99% of Brazilian territory.