South African Broadband Users Reap the Benefits of Competition
Telecoms service providers and operators are preparing themselves to compete in a more deregulated telecoms environment with the result of cheaper and more diverse services on becoming available to the South African subscriber.
Mark Taylor, the Managing Director of Nashua Mobile, noted that whilst the pace of deregulation at times seems frustratingly slow momentum is finally beginning to build up behind market liberalization.
“Consumers are already benefiting from choice. No longer is Telkom the only company that can provide a broadband connection – other options such as Sentech and iBurst have come to the market to compete. We’re finally seeing progress in South African telecoms.”
The Convergence Bill which allows government to license wireless broadband players to serve customers directly is expected to spur fierce competition in the wireless market over the next year.
Currently wireless operators are scrambling to launch their 3G services and looking ahead to launching the even faster HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) technology.
The launch of WiMax services is also on the books with many of the wireless broadband providers in possession of a WiMax testing license and aggressively pursuing WiMax options.
In the near future, businesses and consumers will be able to select from a wide range of fixed-wire and wireless voice and data solutions.
Choices will range from fixed-line operators like Telkom and the second national operator through to WiMax, WiFi and cellular technologies.
Taylor foresees that the major players such as the fixed-line operators, ISP’s and cellular service providers and operators will most likely partner to provide customers with access to a bundle of converged products like WiFi, GPRS and fixed line Internet.
Government’s plans to provide portability over the next year or so is adding further incentive to cellular service providers and operators to introduce competitive measures to retain their market share.
Number portability allows the subscriber to retain their number should they choose to move to a different network provider.
This change in the industry has introduced the cellular providers to the huge potential the data market represents.
Vodacom, MTN and CellC all recognize the dual threat of number portability and the introduction of WiFi & WiMax services to their revenues and have all aggressively slashed their data service prices.
More prices cuts can be expected in the month to come but operators are also on record as saying that unique, value-added services will be as important to compete as the costs of their services according to Mobileafrica.net.
The South African Telecoms industry still has a long way to go before it can be considered to meet international standards (or be internationally competitive) as Telkom’s control over most of South Africa’s international bandwidth has hamstrung South Africa’s telecom industry according to a recent report from Genesis Analytics.
And whilst Telkom controls the price of South Africa’s international bandwidth there can be no true competition and growth in this industry.
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