S&P changes Telkom outlook to negative

[Mouse]

The short version: Government needs to get out of Telecoms. Here is a short list of strikingly obvious government failures:

• VANS
• Sentech
• Department of Communictions
• ICASA
• Infraco
• Telkom

And that list gets even longer when you look beyond telecoms!
For example, SABC and Eishkom.

 

[Bern]

Problem is we all know it will never happen (will be litigated 'til we are 6 feet underground!), so the other operators need to get a move on and start building their own.

Ja, pity as it could make a lot of under-performing Telkom infrastructure make some money instead of lose money. I wish Gov would support the other guys by streamlining all the bureaucratic tape to getting fibre etc in the ground. National could set up a few standards and then supply the process and standards to local and provincial gov (in terms of access to trenching rights etc) including some training and things would be a hell of a lot faster. In fact a national GIS system specifically dedicated to this would go a long way to assisting and ensuring no one digs in the wrong place!

 

[j4ck455]

Problem is we all know it will never happen (will be litigated 'til we are 6 feet underground!), so the other operators need to get a move on and start building their own.

I can agree with that, but it needs to be fibre to the curb or tower, and LTE for the last mile, to provide enough wireless bandwidth per subscriber for VoD and any other bandwidth intensive usage.

Maybe 2012 will be the year that ICASA stops retarding progress where spectrum and LTE is concerned.

 

[Bern]

My understanding is that the Cape Town municipality are already doing something along these lines.

Yup, they have a deal with DFA and have put in fibre to their main buildings around the centre of CT CBD and a core ring to Bellville. The access network is still relatively small, but it is a great step forward. Unfortunately they are still mainly focussed on their internal services, so super slow trying to get the wholesale side sorted. On the positive side @ roughly R3 per m per month for dark fibre it is a pretty cheap way to get a super fast metro link (you need to buy hosting in the switching centres, have an ECNS license and so forth) - speed dependant on how much you want to spend on transmission equipment

Basically within 2 or 3 years they will have paid off the entire fibre network just by not paying Telkom for calls anymore as the two main functions of their network is for data transmission (email, servers, etc) and the new IP Telephony system (most of their Telkom bill was made up of local internal calls). Then they will rent out the infrastructure (dark fibre) and actually make money off the asset.

All this because Telkom's systems and billing was excessive - I think the average speed for data connections to each CoCT building was in the region of 256kbps!!! Nightmare. And you are talking MS servers and clients, so REALLY insufficient.