New Telkom ADSL speeds and prices

Telkom’s wholesale division announced on 20 September 2013 that it will increase the speed of its ADSL products free of charge.

From November, Telkom will start to upgrade the speed of its 1Mbps customers to 2Mbps, 2Mbps to 4Mbps, and there will be a split between 4Mbps and 10Mbps ADSL products.

This means that the wholesale rate for a 2Mbps service will be the same as a current 1Mbps service, and a 4Mbps service will be priced at the current 2Mbps.

These are, however, wholesale rates which means that the decision on whether to reduce prices or keep them the same will rest with ADSL resellers (Internet Service Providers).

MyBroadband asked some of South Africa’s prominent ISPs how Telkom’s speed upgrades will impact their ADSL rates.

Telkom ADSL speed increases: what ISPs say

Cybersmart CEO Laurie Fialkov said that some of their bundled products (which include ADSL data and ADSL line rental) will see significant price cuts.

“2Mbps and 4Mbps ADSL subscribers will be the biggest benefactors – they will pay far lower line rentals for the same speed,” said Fialkov.

Fialkov added that their existing 1Mbps and 2Mbps users will automatically be migrated to 2Mbps and 4Mbps products, with the option to downgrade if they prefer.

Vox Telecom’s Douglas Reed said that they are using this opportunity to assimilate all the changes made to their input costs to revamp all of their uncapped offerings – which we will launch in October.

“The reason we developed our usage-based Fat Pipe solutions (with carryover) was to accommodate for increasing line sizes and to offer enough bandwidth for power users,” said Reed.

Openweb CEO Keoma Wright said that they did not have enough time to discuss and calculate the impact of the changes.

“Naturally, we will bring something to the table close to the time,” said Wright.

Afrihost CEO Gian Visser said that they have not received specifics from Telkom as to how or whether this will affect their wholesale product offering to ISPs. “The first we heard about it was through the article on MyBroadband,” said Visser.

“As always we will make sure that our clients get the best possible deal – it’s our goal to continue to be the best ISP and we will always do our best to bring the most affordable DSL solutions to South Africa,” said Visser.

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