When Afrihost buys Cool Ideas, it will own 3 of South Africa's top ISPs

Jan

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If you can't beat them, buy them

Afrihost is set to acquire a majority stake in Cool ldeas, making it by far the largest independent Internet service provider (ISP) in South Africa.

Afrihost was founded in 1999 by three friends — Gian Visser, Brendan Armstrong, and Peter Meintjes — as a hosting company.

It showed strong growth and became one of the biggest players in South Africa’s retail hosting market.

It was not their hosting products that propelled them to a billion-rand company twenty years later, however. It was their move into broadband.
 
If you can't beat them, buy them

Afrihost is set to acquire a majority stake in Cool ldeas, making it by far the largest independent Internet service provider (ISP) in South Africa.

Afrihost was founded in 1999 by three friends — Gian Visser, Brendan Armstrong, and Peter Meintjes — as a hosting company.

It showed strong growth and became one of the biggest players in South Africa’s retail hosting market.

It was not their hosting products that propelled them to a billion-rand company twenty years later, however. It was their move into broadband.
Well there goes another isp with decent support.
 
Is Afrihost just buying a stake or intending to merge their customer base into their own services/network etc?
 
Is Afrihost just buying a stake or intending to merge their customer base into their own services/network etc?
Just buying a stake (majority). Cool Ideas, like Axxess, operate as an independent ISP and brand with its own management.
 
Will we get forced into buying modems on cool ideas that only work on their network and get blocked if we user another brand under the stupid excuse of “it’s required for the network to run optimally”
I cancelled my backup LTE-A with Afrihost cause of that nonsense.
 
Will we get forced into buying modems on cool ideas that only work on their network and get blocked if we user another brand under the stupid excuse of “it’s required for the network to run optimally”
I cancelled my backup LTE-A with Afrihost cause of that nonsense.
Umm, which ISP does this on their line offerings?

The MTN F-LTE thing is a hard requirement for wholesalers and even their own division, it's stupid yes, but hardly Afrihost's fault for being forced to abide by the limited selection which MTN deems "devices certified for optimal quality".
 
Umm, which ISP does this on their line offerings?

The MTN F-LTE thing is a hard requirement for wholesalers and even their own division, it's stupid yes, but hardly Afrihost's fault for being forced to abide by the limited selection which MTN deems "devices certified for optimal quality".
If MTN is forcing them why can I join MTNs Lte or 5G network with any other device? But for Afrihost I need specific devices to hook MTNs network?
And you’re telling me only 4 devices in the whole world of products from Huawei, ZTE, Dlink, Tp-link, etc are capable of offering optimal quality service?
 
If MTN is forcing them why can I join MTNs Lte or 5G network with any other device? But for Afrihost I need specific devices to hook MTNs network?
And you’re telling me only 4 devices in the whole world of products from Huawei, ZTE, Dlink, Tp-link, etc are capable of offering optimal quality service?
Yes, I totally agree on that front, the arbitrary restriction for their F-LTE packages is really asinine, but I see where they (MTN) were trying to go with that. Apart from the really high end prosumer stuff, most MiFi and cheap router devices wouldn't be able to deliver a reasonable throughput for what they try to advertise consistently so they went with this current ZTE + Huawei model and called it a day along with some most likely sponsorships.

This hard rule doesn't exist in regular MTN 4G nor does it exist on Afrihost's AirMobile, and ironically, most people would get better performance on their cheap devices anyways (but purely due to a lack of congestion as data is extremely expensive on this route).

All I'm saying is that you're absolutely right to hold that view as I agree, but it's not Afrihost's fault for needing to stay in line with this rule (as does Axxess, WebAfrica, Vox, InfinityConnect, RSAWEB etc.) otherwise they wouldn't be offering it and this conversation wouldn't exist in the first place :D
 
Just buying a stake (majority). Cool Ideas, like Axxess, operate as an independent ISP and brand with its own management.
I say it's s for the better.
Afrihost clearly knows their game.
They do have issues, like anyone else.
Their position seems towards growth. Which is good.
 
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