Gerhard Potgieter

Today I discovered a new site dedicated to listing broaband packages. Its brand new as ISP’s are still adding their packages on the site as I am writing this entry. The site www.broadbanddeals.co.za looks like it is a MyBroadband.co.za site. The goal of the site is to list all types of broadband packages available by ISPs for the 6 types of broadband services offered in South Africa. The site has a nice control panel for ISP to log into and add packages and details about them in a convenient way. So if you are a ISP feel free to register on the site for free and help make the site a success.

South African telecoms is really starting to take off. Yesterday I wrote about OpenWeb’s VPN ADSL that offered you 30gb international traffic for and odd R700 and something.

Today I found another ISP thats more suited to the needs of the lower end user. SAOL a subsidiary ISP of Cybersmart now offers users a bundled line and high cap account.

The package includes 15GB of unshaped data, a 384K ADSL line, a static IP, aswell as router rental all for only R499. After you reached your cap data is charged at R59 per GB which is still cheap.

Rumour also has it that Cybersmart will soon be offering a solution called Nightrider where only 1/5th of you data usage count toward your cap during 1am and 7am. So if you use 15 gigabytes during the month during these times, only 3 gigabytes will count towards your cap.

Things are really starting to take shape in the South African telecoms space, looks like this could be the work of Neotel selling SAT3 bandwidth to the ISP’s. I would just like to see the big ISP’s like WebAfrica and IS start offering similar products.

OpenWeb recently launched a 30 GB VPN ADSL service.

The service is a 30GB - 512k VPN ADSL account selling for R749 which equates to R24.97 per GB.

The service works through a 30GB local account, included in the price, connected to the OpenWeb VPN server.

This new revolutionary product allows you 100% unshaped bandwidth, P2P and torrent downloads, and pretty much anything you can think of on the net, running over OpenWeb’s fibre Based network for the best latencies!

OpenWeb gets my vote for this one, a great idea in providing South Africans with cheap bandwidth. This is no doubt a step in the right direction to provide South Africans with low cost high cap bandwidth. Great work OpenWeb, now the others must just start to follow.

Rumor has it that Telkom will be launching a 8mbps ADSL trial anytime soon. According to several users from the MyBroadband forum, Telkom techies told them that Telkom will soon be launching a 8mbps ADSL trial.

This comes to no surprise as cellphone companies MTN and Vodacom has launched their 7.2mbps HSDPA services as a trial a month or 2 back.

According to the techies the 8mbps will be first run as a trial to current 4mbps users. My question is just with all this speed when will we have uncapped accounts or high cap account to accommodate all that speed for a fraction of the cost it currently goes for.

So lets just have a look at what the requirements are to have a 8mbps line running at its full speeds. Currently there are various 4mbps users that can’t even achieve their full line speeds, this is cause of the fact that they live far from a exchange. ADSL works at a maximum distance of about 5km from the exchange for normal low end speed. According to the graph below to achieve a speed of 8mbps you’ll need to live about maximum 1.8km from the exchange and that is the worst case to sync at 8mbps. Just take in consideration that there are other factors that can also influence sync rates to the exchanges such as.

• the length of copper wire from your premises to the exchange - this is always higher than the distance ‘as the crow flies’.
• the number and type of other digital services being used by other customers over copper pairs within the same cable sheath.
• the configuration and line quality of the copper wire pair between the exchange and your premises.
• electrical interference from outside sources (such as electric motors).
• the configuration of the copper wiring within your premises (ie use a central splitter for optimal performance).
• the software configuration and application on your computer (in particular how it uses the uplink back to the exchange).
• your ADSL hardware.
• the capacity of, load on, and access data rate of the destination host computer which you are accessing.

All and all I wont say no to a 8mbps line, and sure the majority of users out there won’t either. Maybe this is just what is needed to bring down the cost of faster ADSL speeds and maybe introduce cheap uncapped or high cap accounts. You can follow the MyBroadband thread here.