South African Broadband, hope still lives
Posted on 17. Sep, 2008 by Robert Jooste in Internet
South Africa’s telecomunications cost is very pricy. A very big part of the problem is Telkoms unhealthy stranglehold on this sector and out government’s protection of it.
Telkom acts as any listed company should; working hard to ensure that shareholders enjoy high profits. The government and the DoC are packeting billions, while ignoring the plight of taxpayers who have paid off most of Telkom’s existing copper infrastructure.
Because of Telkom’s high ADSL prices, poor speeds and ridiculously low monthly usage allowances, we are one of the only countries in the world where there are more wireless broadband subscribers than fixed line subscribers. Even morocco has dropped dial uo for the more affordable ADSL.
A giant handbrake at the moment is spectrum allocation; the scraps that Telkom and Sentech are not idly sitting on, are in the hands of a d dithering regulato who is too busy conjuring up numbers, like 20 MHz allocations and 51% black ownership for WiMax, to actually get on with its job.
Telkom has also hurt the market through it monopoly on SAT3/SAFE bandwidth – the only fibre based system connecting us to the rest of the world.
Extremely high international bandwidth costs are often fingered as the biggest hindrance to lowering the broadband prices and increasing the usage limits, (Caps). Until true competition arrives, affordable broadband will remain a dream.
Its not all bad:
Those deep dongas appearing in your roads and sidewalks are actually the telecommunications manna from heaven. Those trenches are where companies such as Dark Fibre Africa, MTN, Codacom, Telkom and Neotel are laying fibre – Gold for any country wanting to keep afloat in the global economy.
Neotel also recently introduced much needed competition to Telkom in the national bandwidht market, and MTN is pushing R1.5 billion into its own national fibre network wich will compete directly against both Telkom and Neotel.
More competition is also on the horizon in the international bandwidth market. Seacom, a submarine fibre cable system on the east coast of Africa which will connect SA to Europe and India, has a capacity of 1.27Tbps and promises to bring initial bandwidth savings of between 80% and 90%. It has a firm operational date of June 2009. There are other international cable systems in the pipeline. EASSy on the east coast, AWCC on the west coast and various others under development.
I personally can’t wait for all of this to happen and finish. I for one am tired of high bandwidth usage.
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