Broadband shootout
SOUTH AFRICA’S SECOND network operator Neotel launched its first multi-user consumer broadband offering last month with NeoFlex Data – designed to offer home and small business users an alternative to Telkom’s offerings. We tested NeoFlex Data against a comparable solution based on Telkom ADSL to determine which offered the better bang for your buck.
January 2009 was a busy month for Neotel, during which it launched NeoFlex Data, penned an agreement for infrastructure sharing with MTN, saw Tata Communications buying a 30% share in the company from Eskom and Transnet and experienced a line break that impacted its service levels when Dark Fibre Africa inadvertently damaged a Neotel cable.
NeoFlex Data is available in two flavours: a 10Gb capped connection for R699 and 15Gb for R899/month. When comparing Neotel’s consumer broadband offering with the Telkom ADSL, we conducted a series of tests on each connection three times and took the data for the best of the three for each solution. Obviously, bandwidth (the capacity of an Internet connection) and latency (its speed) will vary during the day and depending on the nature of bandwidth bought from an ADSL service provider. Our tests were run in the early morning hours of a Wednesday in the Sandton CBD, north of Johannesburg.
Verdict: NeoFlex Data beats Telkom ADSL on price and, with no line installation required, will attract many customers who don’t want to wait for a Telkom installation. However, in terms of performance ADSL takes the cake for both bandwidth and latency – apart from upload capacity, where Neotel has the upper hand.
Telkom ADSL is for you if you use video or audio streaming services and the likes of Skype regularly, where latency may be an issue on Neotel. But apart from that NeoFlex Data seems to be a compelling solution.
Finweek
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