Several weeks ago, the National Long Distance (NLD) consortium, a coalition of telecommunications providers, announced it had completed the first phase of trenching for its new fibre-optic network.
This is only the first part of a planned 5 000km route, but when all is said and done, the NLD aims to deliver high-speed Internet to major city centres and economic hubs across a large portion of South Africa. With high-speed Internet, businesses and residential customers will now have access to new products and services, and improved technological systems.
Among these, voice over Internet Protocol (or VOIP), the technology that allows people to use the Internet to transmit voice calls, is already popular, but with significant improvements in nationwide high-speed Internet, more people are likely to start using VOIP service.
VOIP has become the preferred alternative to traditional phone service mainly because of its cheaper rates. If residential and business customers continue adopting VOIP at the same rate, it will likely become the norm in many countries within the next 10 years, or even sooner.
VOIP provides landline phone service through the Internet, which means that with VOIP, there is virtually no difference between a local call and a long distance call. As a result, VOIP has become increasingly popular as it allows customers to pay extremely low rates on monthly service for unlimited calling.
However, people who switch to VOIP do need to be prepared to convert to high-speed Internet service, if they have not already done so. While VOIP can work with all kinds of Internet service, customers are much more likely to be satisfied with the quality of their VOIP service when they are using a high-speed Internet. And accordingly, a move towards nationwide high-speed Internet service means that even more people will have access to this cheap communications service.
High-speed Internet guarantees a faster rate of data transfer, and so a lower lag time. With Internet that delivers low megabyte per second speeds, the quality of a VOIP call will likely be very poor. The higher the Internet speed, however, the less likely it is customers will deal with call quality problems as a result of lag. Ultimately, it is the Internet service provider that determines the speed of the Internet.
High-speed Internet guarantees a faster rate of data transfer, and so a lower lag time.
The fibre-optic network the NLD is putting in place currently supports 400GBps of traffic, which will give businesses and residential customers access to very high-speed Internet. High-speed Internet is necessary for quality VOIP service, so with these improvements, many people will be eligible for VOIP service who could not have been before. And, if future demands require that MTN increase the overall bandwidth, the fibre-optic network is scalable and will be able to adjust to increases in demand.
Generally speaking, users should have a broadband connection with an upload speed of at least 128Kbps. Typically, an upload speed of about 512Kbps will deliver excellent VOIP service. Speeds with fibre-optic Internet usually range from 12 to 50MBps, depending on the service plan.
That speed, however, is shared across all connected devices. The VOIP service only gets a share of the 12MBps stream. Nonetheless, a user's service should be near perfect with fibre-optic Internet.
Customers who aren't sure if their Internet connection is suitable for VOIP should use an Internet speed test, as available for free in many places. A speed test report will tell the subscriber exactly how fast (in MBps) their upload and download speeds are.
But why should this high-speed Internet announcement mean residential customers should switch to VOIP? For a customer, a residential or business VOIP service offers cheaper rates on local, long distance, and international calling. Customers have reported savings of up to 80% on their phone bills by switching to VOIP.
And for businesses, VOIP offers easily scalable and highly affordable systems for businesses of all sizes. Bigger businesses, or those with internal IT support, can choose SIP trunking services, which allow companies to buy phone systems based on the number of inbound or outbound calls that they can expect at any time. Smaller businesses, or those that don't want to host their own SIP trunking system, can opt for a hosted PBX system, in which the company pays per extension for their office phone system.
With all of the variety and choice in VOIP business systems, it is easy for business owners to land on the exact right phone system, rather than pay too much for an ill-fitting phone system.
The movement towards improved nationwide high-speed Internet is an important step in equalising communication services among people in a diverse geographic area. It's important that people all over the country are able to access the same cheap, high-quality services with equal ease, and improved high-speed Internet capacities will make it easier for lots of people to get the best in Internet and phone services without worry that their location will prevent them from accessing high-quality communication services.
As the NLD expands its fibre-optic network to more areas in South Africa, subscribers will consider services like VOIP that they never before could. It's a cheap alternative to traditional phone service, and high-speed Internet makes it possible.
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