South African ADSL Usage breaks the 100 000 user barrier
Telkom were unfortunately unable to officially confirm this figure, but MyADSL has received information which indicated that the 100 000th customer signed up for ADSL recently.
In early February, Telkom reached the 50 000 ADSL mark.
This means that ADSL uptake grew by around 50 000 users (100%) during the last 8 to 9 months.
Whilst this figure may sound impressive an uptake of around 6 000 new users per month is pathetically slow when compared internationally.
During the same period the Australian broadband community grew by over 100 000 new users per month.
New Zealand, a country with a population of less than 10% of the South African population, grew by around 15 000 new subscribers a month.
To put things in perspective, at the present ADSL growth rate it will take South Africa around 53 years to reach the same current ADSL penetration rate as Australia.
A price reduction is the only real way to ensure better uptake of ADSL. Countries like India have caught on to this and they now plan to slash broadband tariffs by 50 percent in an effort to increase market penetration.
Such a drastic reduction is however unlikely to occur naturally while Telkom enjoys their monopolistic status.
The future implementation of the SNO brings some hope especially when one considers their focus broadband.
This focus is in line with international research and trends which indicate that the time for traditional telco’s making money from calls is over.
Dr. Angus Hay, Transnet’s CTO, has recently pointed out that the second network operator is expected to focus on broadband, giving users much faster data downloads.
Telkom is undoubtedly well aware of these developments and it is not surprising that they are trying to sign up as many new ADSL customers as possible before competition arrives.
Telkom’s negative public image is unfortunately not doing them any favours and a large percentage of their corporate and residential customers have indicated that they will consider migrating to the SNO when they become operational.
And then there is the question of who will be the first to offer triple play (broadband, voice & video/TV).
One ISP is already working on a bundled broadband and voice solution, and it may just be that the broadband focused first tier ISP’s like Internet Solutions and DataPro will lead the way in this department.
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