Slow ADSL? Telkom explains
Telkom has responded to concerns over exchange congestion and delays in provisioning IP Connect (IPC) upgrades to Internet service providers (ISPs) that apply for them.
Following complaints of poor ADSL performance from customers, ISPs have indicated that the fault does not always lie with their networks, but can be due to congestion at Telkom’s exchanges.
Delays in receiving upgrades to their wholesale ADSL capacity — a product that Telkom calls IP Connect — has also been cited as a reason for some users experiencing poor performance.
However, Telkom chief technology officer Alphonzo Samuels said that the issue is not so simple.
Speaking to journalists at a recent Telkom media event in Johannesburg, he said that there was, firstly, no IPC order backlog at Telkom.
“I would be very happy to give anybody that applies for IPC capacity as quickly as possible,” he said, adding that ISPs are welcome to give him a call if there are any problems in this regard.
Alphonzo Samuels
Secondly, Samuels said there are 8 potential points of congestion that might affect an ADSL subscriber’s Internet experience.
These range from Telkom’s network, to whatever national and international connectivity providers ISPs have elected to use.
“It’s easy to blame the [Telkom ADSL] network,” Samuels said.
He said something he noticed was that not all ISPs were increasing their wholesale ADSL capacity in-line with the IPC discounts Telkom had passed on over the past year.
In total, the IPC price reductions come to a 50% wholesale cost cut, he said.
This raised another interesting issue ISPs brought up previously, where the reduction in IPC costs had not kept pace with Telkom’s line speed upgrades.
Many ISPs went so far as to accuse Telkom of anti-competitive behaviour, suggesting that the free doubling of ADSL speeds was a margin squeeze tactic “clearly calculated to erode competition”.
Though counter-intuitive, ISPs argued that this was bad for consumers not only because of the anti-competitive issues, but also because it meant they couldn’t feasibly increase their capacity in-line with the demand higher line speeds created.
Insufficient capacity means an ISP may find itself oversubscribed, potentially offering a sub-par broadband experience.
Samuels responded by saying that this is a convenient argument, but the bottom-line is that after a 50% reduction in wholesale prices he did not see ISPs ordering double the capacity they had before.
While Samuels did argue that many ISPs are not completely blameless, nor completely honest when it comes to ADSL performance, he did not pass the buck entirely.
With Telkom group CEO Sipho Maseko in attendance, Samuels committed to his boss that they will communicate exactly what they are doing around contention and IPC when the time is right.
He hinted that the ongoing roll-out of Telkom’s next-generation network will have a beneficial impact on exchange-related congestion issues, and that they have a number of “exciting initiatives” on the cards for Telkom Wholesale.
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