The best and worst ADSL bandwidth providers

In South Africa most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) resell ADSL bandwidth from wholesale providers like Telkom/SAIX, Internet Solutions (IS) and MTN Business.  This bandwidth is provisioned using Telkom’s IP Connect product – the only way in which an ISP can develop ADSL products using its own bandwidth.

Telkom’s IP Connect product is fairly expensive, and with the additional cost of provisioning both local and international bandwidth it is not surprising that many smaller ADSL service providers opt to become resellers rather than develop their own ADSL products.

There are however a few larger ISPs in South Africa which make use of Telkom’s IP Connect service to develop their own wholesale ADSL products, including Internet Solutions and MTN Business.

These wholesale ADSL providers have the freedom to set contention ratios as they see fit and provision local and international bandwidth which they feel will provide a good balance in terms of service levels versus profitability. 

Up to now very little information was available to compare the various wholesale ADSL providers, but the 2009 MyBroadband Survey sheds some light on how the different options stack up against each other.

To compare the different ADSL ISP offerings the average download and upload speeds from 4 Mbps ADSL subscribers were used.  The following table provides a summary of results:

ADSL bandwidth provider discussion

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