New ADSL pricing structure on its way?

The controversial 30G accounts offered by select Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) for between R199-00 and R 580-00 per month may also be coming to an end.

MyADSL received information outlining the new pricing structure that Telkom/SAIX might be implementing as of 1 November 2005.

ISP’s that are unable to self-authenticate will be able to sell flat-rate accounts ranging from 2G to 30G shaped and 4G to 30G unshaped options.

The low-end shaped accounts remain the same at R127 for a 2G and R157 for a 3G account. All these prices are wholesale and Ex Vat. SAIX are also introducing a new 5G shaped option at R282 per month (Ex Vat).

The big pricing changes occur for the high-end 10G, 20G and 30G accounts which are priced (wholesale) at R560, R1100 and R1620 (ex. VAT) per month respectively.

ISP’s that are able to perform their own authentication and were previously able to offer the extremely competitive 30G account at a few hundred Rands per month will now be charged per-Gigabyte on a sliding scale for traffic per month.

The rates will vary from R54-R59.40 per-gigabyte for a shaped service and R95-R104.50 per-gigabyte for an unshaped service.

This move represents a huge hike in price for a 30G account which could now cost the ISP R1620 Ex Vat as opposed to the previous R 157-00 for a shaped account.

Another big change in the service is that there might now be a hard cap on both local and international traffic. This means that once the users reach their cap their service will be disabled. This will be particularly bad news for South African content providers.

This is a highly controversial move as users have become accustomed to having access to the local content and may negatively impact on the South African online industry.

Douglas Reed, MD of Datapro, welcomes a per-gigabyte billing pricing structure. He says that per usage billing is the way forward as it helps to ensure that users get the service they pay for.

High end users will now have to fork out extra cash should they wish to use the Net for big downloads.

Telkom was not willing to confirm or deny these changes to their service. They were also not willing to comment on the launch of their 1MB service.