Mobile broadband providers will, in the future, move into the fixed-line arena and provide fixed mobile services, says Chris Ross, Vodacom managing executive of products and services.
Ross was speaking at the annual MyADSL conference, at Vodaworld, on Friday, where broadband providers, including MTN, iBurst, Sentech and Neotel, outlined their vision of the future of broadband in SA.
Issues covered included technologies that were likely to be deployed to provide improved broadband services in the future, as well as some of the planned price and speed improvements.
The technology
Angus Hay, Neotel's head of strategy, said WiMax has a huge potential to be a broadband network for fixed mobile services.
The real tipping point for WiMax adoption was in August 2006, when Sprint, a US-based telecoms company, invested $3 billion to roll-out WiMax to cover 100 cities by 2008, he said.
Once a company invests that much money in a technology, it shifts from being niche to becoming a mainstream technology, Hay said.
However, Roelf Diedericks, technical director of Neology, noted that WiMax was too expensive for small broadband players, including municipalities.
Additionally, spectrum is still impossible to get from the Independent Communications Authority of SA and there is little chance of entry for smaller operators, he noted.
Between IP, GSM
The worldwide trend towards UMA phones will also grow, giving users the ability to use the same handset for both their fixed-line (Internet Protocol) and mobile (GSM) calls, Vodacom's Ross said.
"This trend is not a fad and it's going to be popular and become a fairly mainstream offering."
He added that Telecom Italia, among others, has already launched UMA phones. Vodacom also plans to introduce the phones, which will go with a bundled option, he noted.
Ross said while the business emphasis for Vodacom is going to be to grow the data arena, voice remains the killer application. "Most of our revenues come from voice and will continue to come from voice for the foreseeable future."
Improving speeds, prices
DataPro CEO Douglas Reed said while there will be continuous improvement in prices in the broadband market, quality improvements will lag.
Nonetheless, many of the broadband providers are planning to improve their speeds, with Sentech aiming to achieve peak speeds of 800kbps for local connections and 500kbps for international connections.
"We will continue to tweak and improve our services, as we ultimately want to get to download speeds of 1 024kbps and 384kbps uplink speeds," said Winston Smith, Sentech's portfolio manager.
Smith said Sentech, which was ranked very low in the 2006 wireless broadband report produced by MyADSL and the University of Johannesburg, will also provide low-usage broadband packages that are cheaper than dial-up.
The company will increase usage allocation on all its current flexi packages, without increasing price, and reduce ADSL modem prices for some packages, he said.
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