Internet Access post Feb 1

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PCW

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Does anyone know what will happen to internet access after Feb 1?

Will Telkom still control it and resell as they do now or could we have a Freeserve situation? (Unlikely I know :D )
 
:D

I look into my crystal ball and see ...

No changes at all :rolleyes:

The biggest thing is going to be VoIP, not internet access.

I don't see that changing one little bit in 2005, thanks to the stupid costings implemented by the "competition"

To my mind, the lowest we'll ever see next year for a 24/7 broadband will be R600 pm and that'll be wireless, have *** latency, have a cap and have traffic shaping.
 
Well, I wouldn't take our words for it - anything can happen.
I'm making an educated guess based on Telkoms 2005 rates, which have basically gone up, even as we see :-

1. Other world telecomms costs going down
2. The rand strong against the dollar
3. At least another 3 years strong economic growth

So go figure, Telkom obviously feel they didn't make enough profit, so nothing goes down in price and the "competition" just plays along in the same price bracket.
 
What gets me going is tha it costs R1.70 per minute to phone the states & london but R1.86 to phone a local mobile phone :confused:
 
....and it costs me 3p/min (~30c) to call South Africa from the uk.
 
where half your body lands up where you wanted and the other half stays behind?
 
Good day all!

I am very positive about the future, but I am also a realist with the understanding that what has happened in the past with regard telecommunication in this country is still to a large extent evident today. I do not see immediate relief for us come February. I see a little competition in terms of voice over IP telephony and some new wireless Internet startups taking the country by storm. I am not too sure myself how the overseas bandwidth issue is going to be handled, but any businessman worth his salt will know that buying overseas bandwidth and implementing new options for accessing it from South Africa translates into millions!

In short, I see no big changes come February but I am expecting a lot of wireless companies getting off the ground. They will not be cheap however and we will not see prices for 24/7 Internet (not to mention broadband) anywhere near overseas tarriffs for a while.

If the minister is worth her salt, she would split up Telkom immediately! That will change the scene in a matter of months.

Cheers
Ant
 
Despite all the negative issues, if you take a look at how bleak things were before Telkom introduced ADSL (finally) and we got an attempt at competition (finally), things are far better than they were 24 months ago, when the option of a 24/7 broadband connection was out of reach of all but the very wealthy or companies.

My old company was paying R6000 a month for a 24/7 128k diginet line in 2003.
Now at least a company has the option of a more affordable R1000 a month ADSL line (albiet with a 3gig Cap)

The only thing lacking now is real competition in the market place and the fact that ICASA either seems to have no bite or they are favouring a certain organisation !

I'm hoping to see at the very least, a halving of price of 24/7 broadband over the next 2 years.

It also remains to be seen what happens with voIP in this country.
Will we see the same trend of over-inflated costs in the roll out of offerings ? - I think we will, due to the artificially priced cost of bandwidth.
 
You can't host websites on adsl, so most companies still go for the diginet option which is daylight robbery, but what can they do
 
Don't forget that Telkom is not the only barrier to Internet connectivity. Their is also the restrictive licensing issues and several obsolete laws involved. Poison Ivy has liberalized certain things as of Feb 1st, but ICASA is still in the process of introducing new restrictions and possibly outlawing several existing ISP's etc.

In the short term, things could get worse before they improve, ICASA will learn from its mistakes or have to be replaced by consumer groups.

Cheers
Chris
 
Decotey said:
You can't host websites on adsl, so most companies still go for the diginet option which is daylight robbery, but what can they do
Click to expand...

Well, actually no, they would host with an hosting company, unless they were a hosting company themselves - which is not an easy market to compete in.

I host client websites - I could be on dial-up and still be able to host my clients, simply because I go through a reseller.

It's actually reasonably cheap to host over here with a hosting company - of course, like everything else IT related, the cost of bandwidth effects the cost that you can get hosting space for.

My costs at Hetzner are very reasonable. What I charge my clients for on top of hosting costs is updates and maintenance.

A diginet line is a requirement for companies who need a LOT of data transfer at low latency and steady rates that may or may not be related to hosting.
 
I think that you're all missing the effect that VOIP will have.

To make this work, small service providers will offer VOIP to clients and still beat Teklom's telephone call costs while using teklom's infrastructure for the internet connection.

Each VIOP access point will be an internet-capable connection, thereby increasing the number of internet using individuals and companies by a massive percentage.

Last count - End November last year was 32000 ADSL users methinks. Now picture the near future with 1million ADSL users. Now economies of scale come into play in a serious way, and the use of telephones as they were being used falls away.

With 1 mil ADSL subscribers, serious competition is bound to come knocking. As the price of VOIP calls drops, so will the price of our internet connections.

The future is so bright ... shades.
 
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