Telkom in for renaissance?

By Candice Jones for Motorola
Johannesburg, 24 Mar 2009

Off the back of DSL technologies, Telkom has the chance to redeem a competitive spot in a growing telecoms market.

According to Noel Kirkaldy, director of marketing for wireless broadband at Motorola, the incumbent and its competitor, Neotel, have the strongest chance of being leading providers of true broadband in SA.

While the mobile operators have an excellent market position through mobile penetration, Kirkaldy says the possibility of true broadband in SA will not come through them. "Wireless solutions should and could not be used to provide high-speed broadband," he notes.

Kirkaldy says all the market needs is a dose of liberalisation to get going. "We saw it in the mobile providers, with the third operator keeping the others on their toes."

SA`s challenge will be to see the licensed players now start taking advantage of the opportunities, and for them to start competing aggressively. This is where he believes the wireless solutions will play a major role. "They can deploy wireless to capture a customer and then offload them onto a DSL solution later," he notes.

Neotel and, more recently, Telkom, have started to do just that. Neotel deploys primarily on its fixed-wireless solution, and may well offload customers to fibre once it has been deployed; although it does already have customers on a fibre last mile.

Telkom recently announced its WCDMA service, which can be used to hook the customer. It too can offload to its legacy network or coming next-generation network. For the smaller networks and Internet service providers, WiMax can help them reach the customer.

With the coming of dramatically increased international and local capacity through several undersea cables and local operators building national fibre backbones, high-speed broadband, as seen in the international markets (from between 10mbps to 100mbps), is on the horizon for SA.

Convergence and converged services will be the next step for all operators, especially since they can start to expect international service competition once capacity is available, he notes. Kirkaldy says the industry as a whole needs to change the way it is selling solutions. "We are selling technologies. GPRS, 3G, HSDPA, all of these are technologies, not applications."

He explains that the telecoms industry needs to shift its focus to accommodate a new breed of consumer, coming up through the information age. "They are buying into applications - Facebook, YouTube - we need to start packaging applications."

He says the broadcasting industry, even in SA - through the pay-TV operators, have started to sell on-demand broadcasting and other related applications.

For the first time in history, the applications are surpassing the available technologies, he says. "People are developing applications with higher and higher minimum speed thresholds. As a local industry, we will need to find ways of allowing the delivery of those applications."

Fixed and mobile technologies are moving towards a single solution. "There is the potential to finally have a global standard," Kirkaldy notes.

Motorola says Africa is an exciting telecoms opportunity and will prove exciting over the year to come. "We think there will be a small lull in equipment buying, but there are good opportunities waiting for competitive players in SA."