Telkom planning uncapped ADSL offering

The last few days have been a rollercoaster ride for both ADSL subscribers and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) after MWEB stunned the market with its cost effective ADSL offerings.

On Thursday MWEB introduced various uncapped ADSL packages aimed at consumers and businesses, including consumer data-only products priced at R219, R299 and R539 per month for line speeds of 384 Kbps, 512 Kbps and 4 Mbps respectively.

Vox Telecom responded quickly and announced that @lantic will be launching bundled ADSL offerings – which include both ADSL access and an uncapped ISP account.  Pricing starts at R339 for a DSL384 bundle while a 512 Kbps service will cost R589 and a 4 Mbps solution R889.  This undercuts MWEB’s bundled pricing by R10 per month.

Openweb also joined the price war by announcing that they will resell MWEB accounts at the same rates as MWEB.

This is however not where it ends.  Afrihost said that consumers can look forward to their uncapped ADSL services next week, and G-Connect also indicated that they will respond to MWEB’s recent announcement with a competing service.

Telkom planning an uncapped ADSL service

Telkom is fighting fit and  determined to not be left out in the cold.  The fixed line provider said that they have been tailoring uncapped ADSL offerings for the past three years as a customer-specific solution to enterprise customers and first took the Uncapped Usage-Based Service to market to cater for organisations requiring higher data packages.

“The usage-based packages aggregate all usage from all ADSL access locations, regardless of the number of sessions and locations utilised by the customer. This enables organisations to aggregate their usage on a quality service and to obtain data in bulk from Telkom,” said Telkom’s Ajith Bridgraj, Senior Specialist for Media Relations.

“There is also no port shaping or data utilisation limitation in this offering and it works on any of Telkom’s three ADSL offerings (Fast DSL up to 384 Kbps, Faster DSL up to 512 Kbps and Fastest DSL up to 4096 Kbps).”

An uncapped offering aimed at consumers is also in the pipeline.  “Uncapped speed-locked ADSL service consumer offerings are in development. However, no time-frames, offering specifications or price points can be disclosed at this stage. In the development process, Telkom is striving for optimal quality, reliability and affordability,” Bridgraj concluded.

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