The high price of Telkom`s ADSL services resulted in some companies hosting their servers overseas, delegates at the broadband conference heard yesterday.
The conference, organised by MyADSL in association with Johannesburg University`s department of business information technology, brought the South African broadband community together to discuss the state of broadband in SA and examine possible future trends.
After the Telkom presentation, one delegate pointed out that he had been forced to take his Web hosting business to the US. This resulted in a local Web site having to route local users via international lines.
In answer to the probing questions asked by delegates regarding Telkom`s pricing structure, Victor Strydom, Telkom senior manager for product development, said the hard cap structure was meant to benefit low-usage ADSL subscribers who previously paid for far more than they used.
When Telkom evaluated usage among its customers, it was found that 96% of users did not exhaust the 3GB they were purchasing, he said. In fact, he noted, they used just over 1GB. The usage rates had been skewed by the high-usage customers, who used up to 40GB, Strydom said.
"ADSL customers were not paying too much for the service, they were buying the wrong product."
Strydom said the new pricing structure will assist to lower usage costs, as customers will now pay for what they use and no more. The benefit for Internet service providers (ISPs) is that they will have full control of their products, and therefore be in a position to be more flexible in their provisioning. This too will in turn help lower prices, he said.
Delegates were not sold on the idea.
"If it`s good for ISPs, why are small independent ISPs, who hardly have the resources, trying so hard to fight this?" he was asked.
Broadband benchmarks
MyADSL founder and Johannesburg University lecturer Rudolph Muller noted that while ADSL speed in SA is slow, the price is too high. He said this is an economic trend that should not be occurring, as people are paying more for less service.
Muller also provided a preview of the findings of broadband research conducted at the university lab. A finding that did not fit within the sentiment regarding Telkom`s ADSL provisioning was that compared to iBurst, Vodacom`s 3G, MyWireless and MTN`s 3G, DSL 192 delivers 120% of what is advertised.
Muller also compared SA`s wireless broadband penetration with international trends. He demonstrated that while internationally broadband is predominantly accessed through fixed-line, in SA the greatest penetration, at 67%, is through wireless access. He attributed this to robust competition in the wireless market.
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