The MyBroadband survey towards the end of 2008 aimed to establish which broadband services were the best in the market. Telkom’s 4Mbps ADSL service was the winner in the fixed broadband market with MTN and Vodacom’s HSDPA offerings leading in the mobile space.<\/p>\n
An interesting part of the survey was asking users whether they were actively looking for a new broadband service. Here consumers indicated whether they were actively considering a new service or provider, which potential service they were looking migrating to and why.<\/p>\n
A similar study in the UK by research firm Point-Topic indicated that 42.5% of consumers in Britain were considering changing their ISP in the next six months. This is basically the same as in South Africa where 42% of consumers indicated that they were actively looking for a new broadband provider or service.<\/p>\n
Telkom has the most loyal broadband subscribers with only 30% of ADSL users indicating that they are actively looking at changing their broadband provider. MTN’s HSDPA subscribers also seem very content with only 34% of users looking for a better option. <\/p>\n
Neotel with a potential migration rate of a mere 11% would have led the pack in terms of loyalty, but too few NeoConnect subscribers completed the survey to include this information in the survey.<\/p>\n
The companies where the highest ratio of subscribers were looking for a new service were Sentech, iBurst and Vodacom. 60% of Sentech MyWireless subscribers were actively looking for a new broadband service while 57% of iBurst users thought they could find something better in the local broadband market. 54% of Vodacom subscribers said they were looking to see if they could find a better deal elsewhere.<\/p>\n
The biggest potential beneficiary of this migration is Neotel. Most broadband users who indicated that they were actively looking for a new service said that they were seriously considering Neotel’s offerings – more than double the number considering ADSL which is the second most popular choice.<\/p>\n
The main reason why broadband subscribers said they were looking for a new service was price. Most users indicated that they were looking for lower rates for higher usage – something which is becoming increasingly important with new, bandwidth intensive services like YouTube, podcasts and multimedia downloads.<\/p>\n