Telkom ‘Chipac’ – ADSL LLU forerunner?
Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) is currently on everyone’s lips, with consumers pinning their hope on this intervention to make ADSL more affordable and bring more competition to the fixed line broadband market.
The complexities surrounding LLU means that it may take a long time to implement it fully in South Africa, and an intermediate collocation solution may suit both Telkom and its partners better in the short time.
Basic collocation in Telkom’s exchanges is nothing new. Neotel CTO Angus Hay previously explained that they are collocating in Telkom exchanges for interconnect purposes with standard collocation agreements in place.
Chipac service trialled
Good news is that Telkom seems to be trialling a form of LLU/Bit Stream Access collocation service with Internet Solutions.
Telkom confirmed that they are trialling a ‘customer half internet protocol access’ (Chipac) service, but would not reveal any other details about the service before its commercial launch.
Internet Solutions (IS) would also not provide details about the agreement with Telkom, merely saying that “Chipac is in ‘proof of concept stage’ and at this stage we are not at liberty to provide information around this due to confidentiality agreements.”
However, industry sources gave some insight into the new Chipac service from Telkom. According to one industry source, it is a bit stream type solution where Telkom carries leased line traffic to the exchange over their infrastructure, aggregates all the traffic destined for a specific ISP, and hands it over to the ISP in the same exchange.
The ISP, which collocates in the Telkom exchange with their own equipment, then carries the traffic from the exchange to their point of presence (PoP) using their own fibre infrastructure.
According to another industry player the new Chipac service from Telkom gives a company like IS more control over their leased line traffic, and also incurs cost savings as they only have to pay Telkom for a half circuit rather than the full leased line price.
Forerunner to ADSL bit stream access?
It should be noted that the exact Chipac service description should be seen as speculative at this stage and that it may change before the time of launch – but the current model may well be a forerunner to a similar ADSL bit stream solution from Telkom.
Such a bit stream access type offering – where third parties don’t get direct access to Telkom’s copper infrastructure – also makes sense to be launched well before full LLU which is a much more complex process to get right.
Telkom Chipac service << Give your views about this service
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