Vodacom + MTN = guilty
Eager to try and pip each other (and Cell C) to the post, Vodacom and MTN have rushed to announce various upgrades to their respective networks in recent days. It’s a kind of space race, without the moon.
Vodacom snuck an announcement into its third quarter trading update call with analysts and journalists last Tuesday.
It said it had enabled 14.4Mbps speeds at certain sites, and was planning to upgrade its entire network in time for the 2010 Fifa World Cup. Vodacom 3G HSDPA customers would automatically be “upgraded” to 7.2Mbps speeds at no extra cost.
And, not to be outdone, it also announced that it had switched on a test site capable of 21Mbps at its Midrand campus – particularly useful for employees and, no doubt also, for shoppers at the world’s only cellular mall.
Then, MTN announced last Tuesday that its network across South Africa had been upgraded to 14.4Mbps HSDPA. This would also allow for uploads of up to 5.76Mbps.
It’s already upgraded parts of its network to 7.2Mbps download speeds, and this has been made available to customers at no extra charge. MTN says it’s extended this to the 14.4Mbps (where available) speeds and will “not be charging a premium for the higher-access speeds”.
The company also says, rather opaquely, that “MTN subscribers will soon be enjoying speeds of up to 21Mbps as the MTN network is upgraded for enhanced HSPA+ services; this will be rolled out strategically countrywide”.
(Bear in mind that the intense rush we’ve seen from MTN and Vodacom follows Cell C’s announcement late last year that it would be building a 21Mbps network – but no one’s admitting that).
Now here’s where it gets murky.
First, your hardware (mobile phone or USB modem) needs to be compatible with the higher speeds. There are a number of compatible data cards commercially available in the local market, but many older ones won’t be capable of more than 7.2Mbps (or even 3.6Mbps).
The enormous elephant looming in the corner is that users won’t smell anything close to the advertised speeds.
Have you ever gotten close to a constant speed of 3.6Mbps on “normal” 3G?
Both Vodacom and MTN quietly admit that achieving these incredible speeds (14.4Mbps or even 21Mbps) is dependent on backhaul.
This means that the fairly trivial software upgrade performed by Vodacom and MTN on their base stations will mean you may quite easily connect from your laptop to the tower at over 10Mbps. But it’s from that point to the networks’ switching centres where users will hit a bottleneck.
MTN and Vodacom will say that they are installing their own fibre networks for backhaul, but this process is by no means near complete. This means they are reliant on Telkom for these links, and those current links are simply not capable of providing anything close to the advertised speeds.
Let’s not even get into the other constraint which is international bandwidth. Despite the arrival of Seacom and the upgrades on SAT-3, users will not achieve these high speeds consistently.
This is MTN’s caveat: “Achieving these speeds is dependent on various conditions such as transmission, access device capability and the number of subscribers using the site at that particular time of day.”
Vodacom CEO Pieter Uys also offered a rapid “of-course-these-speeds-depend-on-backhaul” explanation on the Vodacom call.
Incidentally, MyBroadband tested Vodacom’s 21Mbps HSPA+ live site in Midrand and found peaks of around 14.6Mbps. To achieve speeds of 21Mbps, the team had to literally place the modem right next to the base station. During a speed test, it achieved fairly stable speeds of around 8Mbps, but bear in mind that the test was done on a Saturday (off-peak) with barely any other users on the network.
In its announcement, MTN points to the R7.1bn investment in its network, as if this is directly related to the sudden upgrades.
It neglects to mention that the bulk of the upgraded capacity was necessary to make its traditional 3G HSDPA experience more usable.
The difference between the moves by the two major operators and Cell C’s planned R5bn network upgrade is that these are extending capacity on top of networks before dealing with backhaul limitations. Cell C is planning to roll out a new high-speed backbone from scratch (the operator has no real legacy broadband network to speak of).
Instead of aiming at the moon, why not focus on fixing the backhaul and international bandwidth issues so that 3G and HSDPA users can use mobile broadband at speeds higher than a few hundred kilobits per second?
MTN and Vodacom HSPA/HSPA+ << Give your views
* Hilton Tarrant contributes to “Broadband”, a column on Moneyweb covering the ICT sector in South Africa. He tries to use 3G at home but struggles to get anything resembling a constant speed. He’s far happier with a constantly (relatively) sluggish service from Neotel.
Loading ...