SA broadband too expensive – MWEB ISP CEO

The South African consumer is still paying too much, while speeds must be improved, says Derek Hershaw

Jan Vermeulen

May 13, 2012

The South African consumer is still paying too much for their data and there must be a concerted effort by industry players and by government to find a way to keep driving down the costs of Internet access.

This is according to MWEB ISP CEO, Derek Hershaw, who was answering a question on the future of ADSL in South Africa during an interview on technology podcast Let’s Talk Geek.

Asked whether he believed the future lay in cheaper uncapped ADSL, lower contention, or elsewhere, Hershaw said that he thinks it’s a bit of both.

“But I think as pricing is increasingly starting to come down now – and there’s definitely momentum there – we need to look at how to start getting the speeds up to the kind of levels that people are experiencing in the first world,” Hershaw said.

He added that he would imagine that we would probably start seeing a skew towards speed.