Over the last six months the local ADSL market has been awash with new ADSL offerings, including more affordable uncapped ADSL accounts and data bundles which included free gaming bandwidth and far lower per-GB data rates. <\/p>\n
This trend is set to continue in 2010, and Telkom Internet has already indicated that it is planning larger data bundle sizes and other innovative product offerings like after-hours usage accounts and variable cap sizes. iBurst is also planning to launch their iDSL offerings next month which include free gaming bandwidth and pricing as low as R29 per GB.<\/p>\n
Cybersmart<\/a> is however the first Internet Service Provider (ISP) to set the cat amoung the pigeons this year with its imminent Weekender service. The ISP plans to launch a new service in the first week of February where Internet usage from midnight on Friday until 5.59am on Monday morning will not be counted towards the overall cap. The offering is appropriately dubbed the ‘Weekender’ service. <\/p>\n “Weekender is a natural extension of our well known after hours product called Nightrider. Nightrider gives you an effective after hours rate or R5 per GB and we were looking at giving a similar rate on the weekend. Weekender will be an add-on service just like Nightrider and will cost R99 per month. If you are on the 384 Kbps circuit none of your usage between midnight on Friday night to 5.59 am on Monday morning will count towards your cap,” explains Cybersmart MD Laurie Fialkov.<\/p>\n “This gives you an incredible rate per GB. If you take our entry level 384 Kbps offering which costs R169 (for comparison purposes with other ISP’s this is R152 for the ADSL circuit + R17 for the 1 Gig cap) and add Weekender to it at R99, your all in cost would be R268. Without trying hard a customer can do 20 Gigs over the 4 weekends in the month, which means the cost per Gig is R5.80 per GB.”<\/p>\n While the ‘free weekend bandwidth’ offer only applies to DSL 384 subscribers, Cybersmart is not leaving 512 Kbps and 4 Mbps subscribers out in the cold. “If you have a 4 Mbps or a 512 Kbps ADSL line, only 1\/10th of what you use over the weekend will count towards your cap,” said Fialkov. <\/p>\n The Weekender product is currently on trial and should be commercially available in the first week in February.<\/p>\n Free ADSL data on weekends<\/strong><\/a> – comments and views<\/p>\n