Brave new world

[rpm]

Brave new world

THE BRAVE NEW WORLD South Africa's telecommunications market has been waiting for will finally be ushered in on 19 January when regulator Icasa issues service providers with infrastructure licences and goes about making key new pro-competitive regulations.

 

[mercurial]

Can't wait!

 

[Vrotappel]

ICASA making pro-competitive regulations? IBIWISI!

 

[pkid]

Hope it works out this year. Still paying analogue voice portion of my Telkom line even though I don't want it and only use ADSL. Still paying the same for data from Vodacom and SAIX. What I think will happen is that they will just introduce more confusing packages that will "add value" to the consumer. Which basically means they will charge the same...

 

[B2048]

haven't we heard all of this before? I would be pleasantly surprised (more like shocked) if they came out with something which actually benefitted the consumer for a change.

 

[Le^stat]

all Telkom would really have to do is upgrade ADSL user line speed ( a notch or 2) and increase caps...and trust me this is not a major thing to do with what is going to be made available next year... Residential customers relatively pleased...

*wakes up... Oh it was only a dream...Looks for coffee*

 

[PPJ]

Key questions for 2009 and beyond

Key questions for 2009 and beyond

* What will the current (and future) infuence of the bad world economy have on all this AND
* What about all the price increases that will be blamed on the world economy

 

[AndrewAlston]

I think what this says is that South Africa is slowly (way to slowly in my opinion) moving towards the same point as the rest of the world, where bandwidth is nothing more than a commodity item and the providers and plays have to compete on value adds. In a highly competitive market, there is very little profit to be made on bandwidth in reality, it has to be made elsewhere and that's what drives innovation and increases service levels etc, because the differentiating factor when choosing an ISP is no longer price. What I'd hope to see in the next 2 to 3 years is that the prices in South Africa have fallen to this kind of level and we can start seeing new products, better service and all the other benefits of competition that tend to be forgotten when everyone is so focused on the price.

Who knows, maybe we'll even start to see decent SLA's (cause the SLA's offered in South Africa are a joke compared to the rest of the world, with most of the tier-1 providers offering anywhere from 99.9 -> 100% availability on circuits taken out of data centres, complete with latency and jitter guarantees etc, infact NTT's standard SLA states "For every hour of downtime you experience, we will credit you a days service")

*Shrug* all in all, bring on the future, and once the competition is properly entrenched, we can sit back and see which of the companies are really capable of playing in this market. Hopefully the incumbents will realize this is no longer a childs play pen where they can throw their toys and have their own way all the time, they actually have to get up and take some responsibility if they wanna survive

 

[kaaskop]

What ICASA can do with the license issue is to let the providers that payed millions for their licenses pay an reduced amount of their income for a certain time to balance the effect. The small players wont have to go out of business and keep the licences as is.

I like the "choose your carrier option". We will have to make a list with all the prefix numbers so we wont forget it.

Mebbe next year i can download all the stuff that iam not supposed to

 

[chopsky]

"pro-competitive regulations" - Why do people not see the contradiction in that?!
ALL regulations are anti-competitive. You want competition? Free up the damn market. Jeez...the stupidity.