ISPA wants Local Loop Unbundling commitment from ICASA

Is there someone out there that can create a website with all ICASA's failures. Make people more aware of this. Make some noise......advertise the website if we must. I will contribute if i have to. Will this be enough? Dont know.....but its a start!!!
 
Sent this article to that portfolio committee on telecoms in parlement.
 
Unfortunately the consumer is due to be taken for a ride again ..

ICASA should have laid down milestones and penalties within a week of deciding the LLU deadline, so that a set of neccessary steps could be completed before the deadline. Unfortunately Telkom will be using smoke and mirror tactics till LLU due date, and will then only really begin the physical process .. using the excuse that the bureaucratic process took longer than expected, and that delays finalizing the new Telkom structure were unavoidable.

This should allow Telkom to skip the blame entirely, and drag LLU out for a further 2 - 3 years with no penalties.

mark my words.
 
They only way LLU will ever happen is if you tell the ANC BMW won't sell them cars until they do.. I bet within 24 hours LLU will be processed... Ok that might sound far fecthed but you get the point

They will just buy Mercs instead.

Is there someone out there that can create a website with all ICASA's failures. Make people more aware of this. Make some noise......advertise the website if we must. I will contribute if i have to. Will this be enough? Dont know.....but its a start!!!

There is no server big enough to house a website detailing all of ICASA's failures.

:p:D
 
This should allow Telkom to skip the blame entirely, and drag LLU out for a further 2 - 3 years with no penalties.

mark my words.

fair enough - no need for telkom to delay while ICASA is doing it for them
 
Is LLU the reason Neotel can't bring a landline to my house?
It is one of the main reasons, yes.
I disagree on a technicality, NeoGhost has the right to offer landline services and could do so at great expense if it chose to do so, so technically NeoGhost could bring a landline to aborg's house.

It does however make sense [financially] to wait for LLU before offering landline services, since LLU would significantly lower the cost associated with landline services for any new entrant, e.g. NeoGhost, the reason being that the infrastructure Telkodemonopolies is still monopolising, can be shared to encourage landline competition and reused to lower the landline market entry costs associated with competing against Telkodemonopolies.

I do however have doubts as to whether unbundling a bunch of aged copper, is actually going to be what consumers need, I would personally much rather have very short "last mile" copper distances & fibre optic the rest of the way, with VoIP for telephony instead of Telkodemonopolies' analogue over copper and what I suspect is an average of close to 5km copper length from a consumer's premises to the local Telkodemonopolies exchange [not including the very few white-painted roadside distribution boxes that have fibre to the exchange and copper to customer premises and mini-DSLAMs].

If for no other reason, LLU must go ahead as it will force !CASA to learn how to do its job which is primarily to get rid of Telkodemonopolies' de facto fixed line monopoly in SA and allow competition to take over when [or rather if] that eventually happens, such that there is a self-regulated market driven by competition as opposed to guavamental interference.
 
@ic: that's why I said it was one of the main reasons! The other being that they will never be able to raise enough capital to lay copper in the local loop!

Going forward I foresee a massive thread on LLU and it implications on all the roleplayers.
 
hey guys-i think ALL of you should send emails (again) to ICASA,Dept of Telecomms, Competiton comission-and whoever else who u think of and complain about LLU and demand to know whats being done about it.and also send letters to the editors of newspapers complaining about the high costs etc..
i think telkom & ICASA aresort of hoping we forget about all this & get carried away by the 2010 hype.
 
I agree with ic, I would also like a very short 'last mile' connection to my house with a fibre backbone from the exchange. In my area the copper is so old and unreliable that nobody can run a decent service on that kind of infrastructure even when LLU happens. Unfortunately for the people in suburbia a huge spend needs to take place in the older areas to upgrade the copper lines on the poles to new fibre or better copper. I don't see this happening very soon, so if you don't live next to the exchange in areas older than 30 years you are basically screwed. I have chatted to my local exchange manager many times since I got fed up with logging calls to fix my ADSL and she said her hands are basically tied, Telkom has no plans to upgrade old neighbourhoods in the near future.
 
I don't quite agree with your local "exchange manager". If there is sufficient demand in an specific exchange area, and by this I mean actual orders placed for ADSL (for example), then they will consider replacing the copper in that specific area.

The other way is to get active in your area and to tell everyone to report their service faulty every time something goes wrong. This includes noisy lines! This pushes up the fault rate for that area and if they can isolate the problem, they will fix it. Even if it means replacing cable or refurbishing the joints in the area.
 
What needs to happen to make Local Loop Unbundling a reality is the drafting of a bunch of watertight regulations that will force a very reluctant Telkom to comply, followed by a means of policing these regulations. The regulations won't just happen, and they won't just be written by a few staff members at ICASA..

An easier way of getting some action would be for ICASA to deny Telkom any income from LL until Unbundled.
 
I think too many businesses want to build their business case on LLU. Why not start building your own loops. The key must be cost based interconnection.

experience in other jurisdictions tells us that only a few will make it. new loops - mostly fibre - are being deployed but the majority of the wired network is still telkom copper

cost-based interconnect will help competition but not the problem which LLU is designed to address
 
@aborg, my memory is a bit fuzzy, but are you not on the Olivedale exchange? - if so, @moggie, the person that manages that exchange should be tortured on a daily basis to get them to do their job.
experience in other jurisdictions tells us that only a few will make it. new loops - mostly fibre - are being deployed but the majority of the wired network is still telkom copper

cost-based interconnect will help competition but not the problem which LLU is designed to address
Yep, the whole point behind LLU, IMO, is to reduce the cost of entering into an incumbent [read monopoly] controlled wired-line market, and thereby give potential new competitors a real chance of actually competing, the end goal being a competitive market that is not allowed to die in the hands of one disinterested monopoly-minded beast that would otherwise let everything go to **** whilst charging human appendages for their disgusting service.
 
ic if I was still on Olivedale I would have been as happy as a pig in sh@$ - I never had a problem there. I moved into a house now and my nearest exchange is Florida. It counts under one of the oldest exchanges in JHB. Nobody in my area (Florida Hills, Floracliffe) get's more than 2meg on ADSL.

@moggie - I have contact with another resident and together we are trying to convince Telkom to put up a mini DSLAM to bring the exchange closer - my copper travels a 3 to 4 k's to get to me although as the crow flies I am 2km away. This will already solve a lot of issues for this area. The main fibre link between Florida and Clearwater runs 100m from my house. aargh...
 
I have no idea what kind of capital layout it would take to "re-wire / fibre" SA. However, would a possible solution to the Telkom problem not be that ALL other Telecoms players get into bed and simply start building their own infrastructure bit by bit, and in that way open up the last mile? Ofcourse the extent of the required capital would determine whether it is possible or not, but guys like NeoTel, DarkFibre and Infraco pooling their current fibre network should amount to a rather healthy backbone, and from their start with adding loops to suburbs, streets and finally individual houses, building, etc.

Forgetting that I have probably smoked my socks one to many times with this idea, would that not be the most wonderfull thing if ALL other Telecoms players could then turn around and tell Telkom to shove it where the sun never sines...

Aah a man can dream :whistle:
 
ic if I was still on Olivedale I would have been as happy as a pig in sh@$ - I never had a problem there. I moved into a house now and my nearest exchange is Florida. It counts under one of the oldest exchanges in JHB. Nobody in my area (Florida Hills, Floracliffe) get's more than 2meg on ADSL.
...
My sympathies are with you, but your experience with Olivedale sounds like it had been considerably better than my experience with Olivedale - the best downlink speed I ever got using multiple download threads is 313.6kbits/s and I was lucky if I got 90kbits/s on the uplink - to the point where using Skype-to-Skype [forget Skype Out] was impossible - just one practical example of how useless ADSL from Telkodemonopolies was for me.

I gave up waiting endlessly for a mini-DSLAM, and cancelled Telkodemonopolies' ADSL, although my cancellation decision was also based on the fact that not being my own boss for the last couple of years also meant that I was not home often enough to actually use the pathetic ADSL line, I have saved a lot in line rental fees since I cancelled [I only use HSPA these days - but then I don't download much either due to the cost issues].
I have no idea what kind of capital layout it would take to "re-wire / fibre" SA. However, would a possible solution to the Telkom problem not be that ALL other Telecoms players get into bed and simply start building their own infrastructure bit by bit, and in that way open up the last mile? Ofcourse the extent of the required capital would determine whether it is possible or not, but guys like NeoTel, DarkFibre and Infraco pooling their current fibre network should amount to a rather healthy backbone, and from their start with adding loops to suburbs, streets and finally individual houses, building, etc.

Forgetting that I have probably smoked my socks one to many times with this idea, would that not be the most wonderfull thing if ALL other Telecoms players could then turn around and tell Telkom to shove it where the sun never sines...

Aah a man can dream :whistle:
There is obviously fibre optic going into the ground all over the place, mostly for connecting businesses though via Metro Ethernet, and maybe one day consumers will have FTTC or even FTTH, but it will not be soon and it will cost a lot - I predict even more than a Telkodemonopolies "Fastest" slow ADSL line costs now.

But the real problem with what you are suggesting, and why LLU is highly desirable, is the cost and time factors - it will take a very long time to build a fixed line last mile solution to consumers' homes and that means very few customers paying a very high price to cover the costs associated with rolling out more of a last mile network, and very few South Africans would be prepared to pay such high early adopter prices.

Much more cost effective IMO to go the LLU route and build from there...
 
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