Bandwidth prices to plummet
South Africa’s local and international bandwidth pricing remains one of the biggest hindrances to broadband and IT growth in the country. New telecoms infrastructure developments, however, promise to remedy this situation.
Speaking at the recent MyBroadband conference SEACOM president Brian Herlihy said that the international submarine cable system rollout was on track to go live on 27 June 2009.
SEACOM will bring much needed competition to the SAT3/SAFE system, promising bandwidth price reductions of up to 90%.
There are also numerous local telecoms infrastructure projects where companies such as Telkom, Neotel, Vodacom, MTN and Dark Fibre Africa are rolling out fibre. There are both inner city and national projects on the go which should mean far more bandwidth and far lower prices.
According to Vodacom business executive Wally Beelders bandwidth prices will most likely reduce by close to 90% over the next twelve to 18 months. This in return will mean lower broadband prices and higher monthly usage limits.
This sentiment is echoed by Dark Fibre Africa (DFA) Director Richard Came, who pointed out that the company’s infrastructure could provide up to 153.6 Tbps of bandwidth to clients. This is equivalent to 1million E1 connections while a single DFA fibre pair can carry 150 million simultaneous voice calls.
Came is confident that the company will have enough capacity for clients for the foreseeable future, an important facet of the DFA’s business case.
With all the simultaneous fibre projects some commentators predicted a bandwidth glut in South Africa in future, but SEACOM’s Herlihy said that the concept of too much bandwidth is not realistic.
According to Herlihy there is always a demand for more bandwidth, and that consumers will always look for more speed if it comes at a reasonable price.
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