IS’s ADSL products ‘SA friendly’
Telkom’s announcement that it will impose hard capping from the 1st of November caused a great deal of unhappiness in Internet circles.
Consumers, ISP’s and local content providers felt that this move was unnecessary and will severely harm an already suffering SMME market.
But all is not lost. Internet Solutions (IS) has developed innovative capped products to compliment their popular uncapped business ADSL solutions.
While it is not easy for a company like IS to compete due to the exorbitant costs of IPConnect and International bandwidth on the SAT3 cable, they are still producing products that compete favorably with Telkom’s offerings.
The high national Diginet and ATM pricing makes it even more difficult for IS and other players to compete with Telkom.
Unlike Telkom’s new ADSL accounts which allow for no additional local Internet usage after reaching your cap, IS’s offerings allow for the use of local traffic after the standard cap is reached.
After you have reached your cap on their services your local traffic will be de-prioritized, but the service levels on local access should still be acceptable. There is however an absolute cut-off point at 30 GBytes.
These services are competitively priced when considering the local market.
An advantage to ISP’s is that IS, unlike Telkom, do not require the purchase of any additional products like Diginet to resell these accounts.
These offerings are already available through IS’s virtual ISP channels, but the full technical specification will only take effect on the 1st of November.
While these offerings are a long way off from what one can expect internationally, it highlights the fact that Telkom’s introduction of hard capping is difficult to justify.
Apart from the possibility of protecting their lucrative Diginet and ISDN markets, there is also speculation that Telkom’s capping system makes it difficult to allow for products like the ones introduced by IS.
Whatever the reasons might be, let’s hope that the Department of Communications is serious about broadband provision and makes it possible for companies like IS to compete more favorably through Local Loop Unbundling, cheaper international bandwidth and self provisioning.
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