Telkom 10 Mbps ADSL upgrades start

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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Telkom’s highly anticipated ADSL speed upgrades are just around the corner, and numerous Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are gearing up to launch new products aimed at 10 Mbps ADSL subscribers.

Telkom has been trialing its 10 Mbps ADSL service for some time already and they initially planned to launch their higher speed ADSL service before the 2010 World Cup.  But the FIFA imposed network freeze and other extenuating factors delayed the launch to mid-August.

The new 10 Mbps ADSL offering will initially only be launched in areas where the exchanges have Metro-Ethernet backhaul, and also only in places where there are high ratios of 4 Mbps ADSL subscribers. 

Telkom South Africa Managing Director Pinky Moholi said that the initial launch is unlikely to exceed 20,000 lines, and that the future rollout of its higher speed ADSL service will be dependent on the uptake of 10 Mbps ADSL and the feedback from subscribers.

10 Mbps ADSL Upgrades starting

In SAIX notices related to ‘planned work’ scheduled on 6 August and 8 August it states that “All 4Mbps users will be upgraded to a service speed of 10Mbps”.  The ‘problem description’ is given as “ADSL 10Mbps Launch”.

The affected users are described as “4Mbps ADSL Users on ME and ADSL2+” while the time for the upgrades are given as ‘longer than 24 hours’.

These upgrades are scheduled to take place in various regions across the country, including Gauteng, Cape Town, Durban, Bloemfontein and the Eastern Cape.

Telkom was contacted for more details about the planned ADSL upgrades, but the company could not provide additional information at the time.

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