No launch date for Neotel commercial services
Speaking to MyBroadband, a Neotel spokesman said that everything is on track at an operational level, and that the company is currently in the process of clearing up ‘engineering issues’.
According to Neotel there are always issues when ‘moving into new spectrum’, and it is currently addressing all related concerns like interference. The company further said that its official launch date will depend on the timelines needed to get all physical sites – which will serve customers through CDMA technology – sorted out.
Angus Hay, Neotel’s Head of Strategy, said that their CDMA trial is continuing, but that the company can not give specific feedback about the trial results yet. The company will launch ‘fast Internet’ services using CDMA2000, and follow on with ‘true broadband’ offerings using WiMax in future.
Launch date still uncertain
When pushed for an official launch date the company said there are many factors influencing the launch of their services, and while they are on track at an operational level a specific date is not a possibility at this stage.
The second national operator previously indicated that they moved their initial launch date of late 2006 to September 2007, but while the company said that it is still possible they did not want to commit to a September launch.
Hay did however confirm that their billing systems, marketing plans and related projects are on track, but that any more detail may give too much away to their competitors.
Neotel MD Ajay Pandey recently said that people should also see the full licensing and spectrum issue in context. While the company was licensed in December 2005, it only received its 800 MHz CDMA spectrum a few months ago.
“We got that frequency only three months ago, and that whole process took more than a year in terms of hearings and in terms of giving in our submissions. And it's been three months since we got the spectrum, and in another eight weeks or ten weeks you will see CDMA getting deployed in Pretoria and Jo'burg to start with, as a part of our pilot,” Pandey told Moneyweb in June this year.
In early June, Pandey did however promise that ordinary South Africans should see services from Neotel within “the next few weeks”, and considering that this was nearly three months ago many consumers are starting to lose trust in Neotel as they continue to fail to provide concrete launch dates.
InfraCo not holding Neotel back
The ongoing political and legislative wrangling regarding InfraCo – the state owned broadband network provider – directly influences Neotel as they will use this network for their national backhaul bandwidth requirements.
While many people believe that this may hold Neotel back, Hay said that these discussions and regulatory issues do not influence the company’s progress at a practical level.
Hay further pointed out that Neotel currently has various live circuits on their network which should serve to show that the company can provide telecoms offerings despite the ongoing InfraCo discussions.
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