Telkom 40Mbps VDSL to give world class speed

Telkom’s planned 40Mbps broadband service will give South Africans a truly world class broadband experience

Rudolph Muller

September 13, 2012

Telkom recently announced that it would kick off a pilot project to trial digital subscriber line (DSL) services of 20 megabits per second (Mbps) and 40Mbps. These speeds will mean that people with these services will get truly world class speeds.

The latest Net Index statistics, which use data from millions of recent test results from Speedtest.net, shows that the average global broadband download speed is 11.66Mbps.

Telkom’s ADSL network typically provides real world speeds close to the advertised speeds, and users of Telkom’s 20Mbps and 40Mbps should therefore experience real-world speeds exceeding the global average.

Live testing of the service during a demonstration showed speeds of between 20Mbps and 50Mbps using the service.

Even when looking at the top nations globally, where 100Mbps and 1Gbps fibre access is commonplace, the average speed is seldom higher than 40Mbps.

According to Net Index, Hong Kong has the highest average broadband speed with 42.17Mbps, followed by Lithuania with 33.40Mbps, and South Korea with 33.31Mbps.

This means that Telkom’s 40Mbps VDSL users may well experience average higher speeds than those in nations such as South Korea or Japan.

It should be noted that this article compares the peak speed in South Africa with the average speed in the top broadband nations. However, it remains encouraging that local consumers will soon be able to experience speeds which were previously only available in more developed broadband economies.