Neotel WiMax, fibre on track

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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Neotel recently launched its CDMA-based NeoConnect consumer offerings  and is on track for a high-end WiMax consumer service this year.

Tellumat has been named Neotel’s preferred supplier to provide, implement and maintain the soon-to-be-launched national WiMax network of Neotel, South Africa’s first converged network operator.

Neotel is rolling out a fixed WiMax service (802.16d) and will initially focus on the corporate market with a dedicated 2Mbps service. In future the company will, however, move into the residential market with a WiMax broadband offering aimed at high-end consumers.

The company has said that WiMax customer equipment costs are still a barrier to entry – something the company expects to change when WiMax becomes a more widespread connectivity method.

Neotel also said it will apply for spectrum in the 2.5GHz band after ICASA recently announced that it would hand out 20MHz of spectrum to six new operators.

Apart from its WiMax plans, Neotel is also building a fibre access network in all the major metropolitan areas. 

The company is already serving corporate clients with fibre-to-the-premise (FTTX) offerings, and is looking at providing fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) services to residential consumers in the next few years.

Neotel has said that South Africa remains a price-sensitive market which makes high-end residential services difficult to sell.  The company is confident, however, that consumer bandwidth demands and usage patterns will change in future to create a growing market for very fast and high-usage broadband products.

Neotel discussion