Seeing double
The service provider expects to double international bandwidth again in the next 18 months, if not sooner.
IS earlier this year increased its international bandwidth capabilities to 1,5Gbit/s due to demand from its customers. “There’s huge pent-up demand for bandwidth in the SA market, and we expect that it will be a long time before it is satiated,” says IS access solutions manager Mark Strathmore.
Growing adoption of ADSL among small- and medium sized businesses is one reason that demand for bandwidth is accelerating at such a rapid rate, says Strathmore. The per-unit price of bandwidth is falling rapidly, which means that many businesses can now afford to buy more of it to service a growing range of applications, he adds.
IS already derives a significant portion of its Internet access revenues from business ADSL. The contribution that ADSL makes to IS’s access revenues is expected to continue to grow over the next few years.
ADSL has brought the cost of always-on Internet access down to a level where it is affordable to price-sensitive small and medium enterprises (SMEs), creating more demand for international bandwidth. Larger companies such as banks are also using bandwidth in far larger quantities than they were just three years ago, says Strathmore.
“The advent of broadband has made it possible for SMEs to do business with each other and with large organisations online. This, in turn, has forced larger enterprises to increase their bandwidth capacity to feed the SME demand,” he says.
IS derives much of its competitive edge from its ability to source, price and manage the raw commodity of bandwidth better than other service providers, adds Strathmore. For example, IS is able to offer a range of uncapped ADSL solutions with fixed- IP addresses at a relatively affordable price for business users.
These services allow clients to use as much bandwidth as they need each month rather than having their traffic capped at a certain level. “The ability to supply and manage large quantities of bandwidth is the ticket to play in the Internet access market. We’ve thrived by providing high levels of service and customer-focused bundles of access and value-added services,” says Strathmore.
IS complements its ADSL offerings with valued-added services such as antispam, firewall, virtual private networks, voice-over-IP, bandwidth and fax-over-e-mail.
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