The ADSL Tipping Point

[curiouswanderer]

With the announcement of MWEB uncapped at affordable prices and then competitors following suit, looks like the ADSL pricing tipping point has finally arrived. Hope this isn't just a special offer and it can sustain itself.

I remember those days when ISPs would say they do not want to get into pricing wars with the arrival of seacom and endless predictions about price decreases...it has finally happened by your smaller ISPs being brave and taking the dive. first I can think of is obviously Afrihost. well done. It'll make a great difference for the country, albeit slowly but a good way forward.

 

[cda]

Well, the complaints about "sustainability" are nonsense really, it's blatantly larger ISP's trying to protect their price point.

When you scale up to larger capacities (2nd tiers with gbit pipes and such) the cost to serve on a per-bit basis becomes almost negligible.

Essentially, to an ISP like Internet Solutions they've got a lot of headway to reduce their costs. For one thing ISP's with datacenter hosting are double-serving their pipes, since they sell upstream one side, and downstream the other side and then cross connect at zero.

The other catch-22 is that modelling cost per-bit creates is an extremely complicated and expensive thing to do. Selling straight pipes is far less complicated and far easier when you've fixed the problem of access to bandwidth.

Now you lay a fibre, that gives you infinity capacity from GBE and any expansion of that capacity is CAPEX. It now becomes more cost effective to sell uncapped (with 'fair use' or whatever policy), and stop screwing around with split local/international nonsense.

So ya... All it takes is for some people catch a clue. Our ISP industry is extremely headstrong (read: A bunch of old, moronic and ignorant cluetard relics from the days of COBOL who should have retired 15 years ago)

 

[Srack0verflow]

please (all ISPs considering the 'uncapped' route) just put a proper AUP together