Telecoms company Storm has unveiled its first commercially installed wireless voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) solution, based on Sentech BizNet Xpress, at a Gauteng-based advertising agency.
The solution has been live since mid-October, the company says.
"The significance of this announcement is that it officially marks the first genuine alternative to Telkom's fixed-line Diginet product [a dedicated product for VOIP services]," says Dave Gale, business development director at Storm.
Gale says the tests Storm conducted on the solution in the past few weeks showed BizNet Xpress competes favourably with Diginet in terms of quality.
Price and service
While it is vital the quality of BizNet Xpress equals that of Diginet, this alone would not win customers, he says. Price and the time it takes for Telkom to install a Diginet line are also issues, he says.
It takes Telkom up to 13 weeks to install a Diginet line, while Sentech completes technical installations within two weeks, says Georg Wenhold, BizNet product manager at Sentech.
Diginet has also been seen as expensive for the market, with only larger medium and large corporations able to afford it, says Richard Hurst, an analyst at BMI-TechKnowledge.
Gale notes that while pricing has not been finalised, it will be about 50% lower than Diginet, with the cheapest offering at R2 000 per month for a 64Kb leased line.
The challenge for the offering is that BizNet Xpress does not have a wide footprint and the reliability of the service will be critical to winning over customers, Hurst adds.
First VOIP interconnect
VOIP provider VoxTelecom confirms it has signed an interconnection agreement with Telkom, and claims to be the first VOIP provider to do so.
The deal is significant for VoxTelcom, as it signals the overcoming of a major hurdle to the widespread adoption of VOIP telephony, says MD Jaco Voigt.
"We can now exchange calls directly with Telkom via local links, which means we can offer our customers much higher-quality VOIP calls at a very competitive price."
Additionally, VoxTelecom can now offer its own range of 087 numbers, a benefit that will increase its range of services tenfold, he says.
"The ability to get interconnection working properly is the biggest single influence on the success of VOIP," he says. "Now that the gates are open, we expect to see a big surge in demand in the next few months."
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