Neotel on track with Fast Internet offering
Neotel announced last year that it will launch its long awaited consumer offerings in the first quarter of 2008, and the company has reassured consumers that it is on track to achieve this goal.
Neotel is deploying CDMA 2000 – a wireless technology similar to HSDPA – as its primary technology for the local consumer market. A pilot service was launched last year and Neotel describes the results as positive.
“The pilot services over this technology have been quite successful, with a high degree of positive feedback received from initial pilot customers,” said Neotel’s Fani Zulu.
“The feedback also allows us to constantly make improvements to the service. Just as we are constantly making improvements to our offering, we are also aggressively pursuing our plans to go to market which includes infrastructure rollout in major metropolitan areas.”
Neotel says that it is satisfied and excited with the progress to date and asserted that the majority of the pilot customers are pleasantly surprised with the quality of service and ease of use. “This, in turn, has given us comfort that Neotel will launch its consumer offering as planned,” said Zulu.
Zulu points out that the current pilot service score cards indicate the following strong points of the service:
- The ease of service activation is a hassle free experience.
- The ease of setting up the service for internet usage and the quality of internet connectivity
- The internet access speeds on CDMA2000 EVDO
- The ease of use and convenience of making and receiving calls
The company says that it will add more external customers to its pilot over the next few weeks and added that further testing on the billing system will be applied.
Zulu said that a detailed marketing communications plan has already been put in place for the commercial launch of the consumer services, but that this date will only be made available closer to the actual launch.
Speed and Pricing
Some questions have been raised about the performance of CDMA 2000, but Neotel says that the downlink speeds achieved on the service are very good.
“The Pilot users on the program have been consistently achieving in excess of 1Mbps average download speeds over the CDMA 2000 1x EV-DO services in coverage areas. However, we believe that, as the network gets loaded, customers can expect to achieve a minimum range of 300-700 kbps average download speeds,” said Zulu.
This corresponds to peak speeds of 2.4 Mbps over EV-DO Rel 0 technology, and of 3.1 Mbps over EV-DO Rev A technology.
Pricing for the service remains a closely guarded secret. Neotel however indicated that they “have developed comprehensive pricing models towards the commercial plans for our consumer services, but that the actual pricing will only be made public closer to the commercial launch”.
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