Hey, we’ll be calling soon
TELKOM MAY YET HAVE a rival in the home telephone services market to contend with early next year when Neotel finally launches its consumer voice and data services.
Angus Hey, executive head of products and strategy at Neotel, speaking at the MyBroadband conference, said the company is actively piloting its consumer services and expects to begin offering them in Gauteng, Cape Town and Durban in first quarter 2008.
Pricing is a closely guarded secret, if you’re wondering. However, consumers may soon see the fruits of a qualitatively superior and efficient service. Hey says that the company is already piloting two services, both having a voice and data component to them.
The basic service has a voice and a data component running at peak speeds of around 150Kbps. That makes it faster than dial-up but slower than any current broadband offering. Neotel’s second offering that it’s piloting is a high speed Internet and voice service, which will have peak speeds of between 2,4Mbps and 3,1Mbps, making it faster than most of the current broadband offerings.
Feedback from the pilots, says Hey, already shows the potential uptake when Neotel launches its products. Users were seeing average speeds in the 300Kbps to 700Kbps range. That’s fast to you and me.
Both services will run off a CDMA EDVO RevA wireless system, a high-speed system similar to the 3G/HSDPA systems that cellular operators use. The advantage that Neotel will have over all other providers is that voice and data will be delivered across the same link. So there’s no incremental cost to deliver data services.
That’s a welcome and viable alternative to Telkom, which has monopolised market access and pricing for many years. With this service it seems that Neotel might be on the right wavelength.
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