MWEB ISP boss Derek Hershaw is of the opinion that you will be able to buy a stand-alone data circuit or service, referred to as “naked ADSL“, from Telkom.
“I think it will happen, it’s a question of when,” Hershaw said in a recent interview on local technology podcast, Let’s Talk Geek.
Hershaw said that naked ADSL is something for which MWEB advocated quite strongly at one of the hearings held last year by the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA).
However, the findings from the ICASA hearings released in November 2011 made no mention of naked ADSL.
“Telkom’s argument is that there’s this ‘access deficit’ and that they have to use the revenues from [voice] services to subsidise the cost of data services,” Hershaw explained.
“ICASA has indicated that they’ll do a full study into that to determine whether that is the case and to what extent and then they’ll have to look at some way of funding that deficit,” Hershaw added.
An access line deficit recovery scheme is set to be introduced with a new ADSL wholesale model known as bitstream access in November 2012, but ICASA said that this would not necessarily include naked ADSL.
However, Hershaw said that he remains positive that in time naked ADSL would happen.
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