Vodacom and iBurst will soon launch their WBS WiMax services commercially, competing directly against Telkom’s ADSL and leased line services. These WiMax offerings will be aimed to businesses looking for a substitute for Telkom’s fixed line offerings.<\/p>\n
The WBS WiMax services will come in two basic flavours – an assured rate service and a best effort broadband service. The best effort broadband WiMax service will be offered at 512 Kbps and 1 Mbps speeds.<\/p>\n
iBurst recently released the WBS WiMax pricing which ranges from R855.00 per month for the broadband service, capped at 5 GB, at 512Kbps all the way through to R11 616.00 per month for the top end assured rate service.<\/p>\n
The best effort broadband pricing came under fire from consumers, especially since it is significantly more expensive than Telkom’s WiMax offering. The service is also more expensive that Telkom’s ADSL offerings without the flexibility of selecting your own ISP and many different account types.<\/p>\n
Vodacom and iBurst is however confident that their pricing falls in line with industry standards and that their service will be able to compete against similar services in the market.<\/p>\n
iBurst said that it can not disclose how the pricing levels were calculated for WiMax due to confidentiality, but feels that it is not out of line with current market related prices.<\/p>\n
“An appropriate comparison must be made when comparing iBurst WiMAX to that of Telkom’s offering. When compared to a similar Telkom broadband offering is slightly more expensive, the difference is due to the symmetrical access i.e. same upload and download speeds, designed to support increasing upload speed requirements by SMEs to support hosted applications,” iBurst said.<\/p>\n
“When compared with Telkom’s dedicated Internet access and other layer 3 services, pricing is similar and in some instances less expensive. According to Telkom’s call centre they only offer WiMAX in instances where ADSL cannot be offered to customers that have applied for an ADSL line, it is not freely available as a product option.”<\/p>\n
Compete against ADSL?<\/strong><\/p>\n When asked whether iBurst is confident that their WiMax service will be able to compete against Telkom’s ADSL offering, the company said that their WiMax broadband product has been implemented to provide a competitive substitute to ADSL in the SME market. <\/p>\n “It has the added convenience of being a one step ordering process that includes bandwidth and Internet access. The only prerequisites for service subscription are credit vetting and that the installation location falls within the coverage area,” said iBurst.<\/p>\n Vodacom added that Telkom’s WiMax service is only offered to customers in cases where they have applied for ADSL and it is not available. “Customers are required to have a Telkom line installed before they can subscribe to the service,” said Vodacom.<\/p>\n It seems that iBurst and Vodacom are banking on an easier product application and installation process to compete against Telkom’s offerings. The fact that Telkom’s pricing is more competitive and the installation process is cheaper may however make life difficult for the two wireless broadband providers.<\/p>\n At a monthly price of R 1 334.00 for a 1 Mbps WiMax service with 10 GB of shaped bandwidth many business may feel that Telkom’s 4 Mbps ADSL service with a similar usage allowance at around R 1 100.00 is a better option.<\/p>\n iBurst and Vodacom is likely to commercially launch their WiMax services in the beginning of October.<\/p>\n