Fast is Slow T
he big news recently in the land of Interwebz was Telkom’s official launch of VDSL to consumers on Monday, after having run a 3-month trial in selected areas. The launch itself was not accompanied with much fanfare, though ISPs throughout the country have been peppering the web with VDSL offers. But before you rush out to go and get 20Mbps or 40Mbps internet speeds – chances are you can’t. The VDSL exchanges, called MSAN’s (Multi Service Access Nodes) are being rolled out over the next two years. MSAN’s will ultimately replace existing DSLAM (Digital Subscriber Lines Access Multiplexers) and POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) exchanges, and be able to handle multiple services from a single structure. Big players like Telkom (obviously), Mweb and Web Africa have already announced their VDSL offerings, including Uncapped products for consumers and business. Initial pricings seems pretty hefty, with line rental alone increasing to between R540 and R795 per month. Uncapped offerings are also fairly expensive, with Telkom themselves charging up to R5 000 for business Uncapped services. Other ISPs are offering similar accounts, also ranging close to the R2 000 mark for 40Mbps. Most ISP’s Capped offerings are 20 and 40Mbps ready, and the excellent news for consumers is
that per GB price is set to decrease dramatically as the bandwidth usage increases. Vox Telecom plan to cut their per GB price to around R5 per GB on their lowest tier packages, and other ISP like Mweb and Afrihost are all poised to revise ADSL pricing very soon. Most ISPs have also dropped their Uncapped ADSL offerings, with Web Africa dropping Uncapped prices by an average 30% (and most other ISPs doing something similar). However there are many questions being raised about whether we are actually ready for this faster internet. In recent times Telkom phased out 384kbps ADSL and introduced a 2Mbps option, which essentially added an approximate 30% demand increase on existing infrastructure. While the plan was undoubtedly to eventually lighten the load on those exchanges by introducing VDSL, the infrastructure in the meantime seems to have taken severe strain. Several areas reported heavily congested Telkom exchanges, with multiple ISPs coming under fire from their clients for not being able to deliver speeds and stable internet. The question that many are asking is will the new speeds hold and be stable? For now, it’s difficult to say, but it’s not as rosy as it may seem from the outside. Initial reports of VDSL performance in trial areas has
Feature
by Suvesh Arumugam
Appearances can be deceiving
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