Paul Jacobson

News just broke about MWEB’s new pricing for its ADSL offerings including a remarkable R219 for uncapped ADSL (for a 384 kbps ADSL line).

Businesses can expect to pay between R499 for 384 kbps DSL and R2 359 for up to 4 Mbps DSL. These prices are a little misleading and they vary depending on whether you are including ADSL line rental in your 12 month contract with MWEB (oh, yes, you need to sign a 12 month contract with MWEB).

The local Twittersphere has just gone crazy at the news with a number of people spreading the news as if it is the biggest ADSL news for the year to date. It is certainly fantastic news for MWEB subscribers who have been paying ridiculously high prices for their ADSL access so far. This pricing is not, however, the best pricing available to consumers or businesses. I don’t know how many businesses are still using 384 kbps lines unless their traffic is pretty much limited to email for a couple people so let’s assume more people will be using the faster connections. Once you are looking at pricing for the faster 4 Mbps lines, you can expect to spend around R2 000 for the pure data component with MWEB. Still not bad for an uncapped and unshaped ADSL connection, for sure. Well, until you consider Afrihost’s pricing …

You may be familiar with Afrihost’s R29/GB pricing offer which just seems to keep going. You may even be aware of the occasional double-up offer where you can buy 2GB of Afrihost data for R29. I just noticed that Afrihost is giving a lot of data away as part of its higher end packages (granted, the service is semi-shaped if that makes much difference to you):

I have a 50GB package with Afrihost and we tend to use around 60GB to 70GB on heavy months. 100GB is, practically, an uncapped package for us. I could probably find some way to use 100GB if I try hard (yes, I know it is easy to use that much data on illegal data transfers, I’m talking about the legal or semi-legal stuff) but it is quite a bit of data for R950. The price will probably revert to R1 450 for 50GB in June but that is still cheaper than MWEB’s equivalent, at least for me.

So, yes, MWEB’s pricing is great news for consumers, particularly its users who have been paying its absurdly high prices in the past but it isn’t exactly revolutionary for those of us who have been Afrihost customers (and other pioneers’ customers).

Welcome to the party MWEB, what kept you?

I am working at the airport for a couple hours this morning after dropping a relative off for a flight back home. The traffic heading back to Joburg is hideous so its worthwhile working here for a bit.

I just connected to Internet Solutions’ AlwaysOn hotspot at the Mugg & Bean at OR Tambo airport and I did a Speedtest like any geek would on connecting to a new hotspot and was pleasantly surprised by the upload speed for a change:

High upload rates are really important for the social Web which often involves more uploading than downloading. Current upload rates on ADSL are frequently miserly and this only stifles social media adoption when users are faced with slow uploads to popular social networks.

I’m going to upload something just to experience the boost in speed before returning to my usual upload trickle.

I received a heads up from G-Connect’s agency, Emerging Media, about a special offer for the holidays a couple weeks ago. You may know that G-Connect is one of the broadband providers I use although mostly while I am on 3G. I use Afrihost as my main provider because its ADSL is cheap and can accommodate multiple concurrent connections. That being said, I often think my G-Connect connection is faster than my Afrihost connection when I do use G-Connect ADSL. I don’t know if it is actually faster but it certainly feels that way. If you are interested in my thoughts about these two providers in particular, check out my post about them.

Anyway, the special offer is pretty appealing and probably an attempt to deal with the explosion of ADSL providers offering prices even lower than Afrihost’s R29/GB although with mixed results. Here is part of the press release I received:

Adding even more fuel to the debate around the price of broadband Internet connectivity in South Africa, WirelessG has launched a promotion on their G-Connect product that sees it slashing pricing on ADSL, Wi-Fi and 3G Internet access by as much as 59% between the beginning of December 2009 and the end of January 2010.

The preferential pricing is available as part of a promotion the company calls its ‘30-Day Broadband Pass’ and as its name suggests, differs from the company’s G-Connect prepaid Internet offering and offers users the opportunity to get substantial discounts of between 39% and 59% on all access mediums while having a cap of up to 9GB for only R200. The effective price on ADSL is as low as 2.2 cents per MB while 3G is 28 cents per MB. However, when using this convergence bundle users will be required to consume their entire data allocation within 30 days of its purchase.

“While the promotion won’t see any data capacity rolling over from one month to the next, as is the case with the existing G-Connect product , the big win is that the offering is unlimited in the sense that existing and new users can purchase as many of these ’30-day passes’ as desired. They will further have the freedom to access mobile and fixed line networks which will be a specific requirement in the festive season with users travelling to holiday destinations. With this kind of product, families can hammer the networks at prices almost half of their existing bandwidth costs”, explains Carel van der Merwe, CEO of WirelessG.

“We believe that the promotion will do wonders for opening the market’s eyes to what’s possible with substantially larger data capacity limits and more cost effective pricing,” he says.

“This exercise will also give us and the market a view of what’s to come in the near future,” he adds.

Van der Merwe says that the ‘30-Day Broadband Pass’ promotion can be done due to the ease of use of our service and is a result of a temporary set of price reductions. “It is not designed to mislead the market, but to offer something special to satisfy the need of the December to January holidaymaker,” he says.

This announcement follows last week’s G-Connect price drop where the normal G-Connect ADSL rate was lowered by 29% to as low as 3.5c per MB. Prepaid users will therefore also qualify for lowered rates regardless of whether they purchase a ‘30-Day Broadband Pass’ or not.

G-Connect could do a couple things to improve its service, generally speaking, including its hit-and-miss Connection Manager which can be pretty temperamental. If you are away from your usual ADSL connection over the holidays and your mobile provider is still ravaging you with high mobile data costs, take a look at its pricing and this special offer. It may be worth your while.

You can find my N900 pseudo-review post right here but feel free to continue reading and read my initial thoughts too.

I picked up a Nokia N900 yesterday to test for a couple weeks. I’ve been looking forward to using one of these devices for a while now and what I saw at the recent Nokia forum event excited me a little more. It is really important to point out that the N900 is not due to be available in South Africa at all. These devices haven’t even been approved by ICASA. Although the version I have is a retail version, it is one of 3 in the country and is purely for limited review. (see below for an exciting development) My approach to the N900 is to use it to get a sense of what Maemo as an operating system can do compared to S60.

Update (5 December 2009): I received some exciting news from Tania Steenkamp at Nokia SA last night. Nokia SA’s GM, Mathia Nalappan, has managed to secure N900 stock for the South African market. Nokia SA expects stock to arrive in 2Q 2010! I am going to post a more substantive review pretty soon. I have been using the device as my day to day device since I received it from Nokia.

Below is a FriendFeed channel embed (yup, FriendFeed is still around and the best service I could think of for what I want to do in this post). My plan is to post updates as I go and probably round up with a more complete post later.

News of Afrihost’s special offer has spread like wildfire and for good reason. Afrihost is offering ADSL connectivity for a low R29 per GB which is probably the lowest price in South Africa at the moment.

I am currently an Axxess customer and I just called Axxess to find out if they have any price drops planned. The sales person I spoke to said I should keep an eye on their website over the next 2 months or so because they are “looking into” reducing their prices. I pointed out to her that Axxess is going to lose a bunch of customers because Afrihost’s special offer is only valid for a limited time period. She asked me if I am a customer and I said I am an Axxess customer but I use a fortune of data (35GB this month so far) and it is costing me a bomb. She basically just told me to keep an eye on the site.

Being the lawyer I am I just called Afrihost and asked for the fine print for their ADSL offering. They don’t seem to have any but I did find out the following:

• if you have exceeded your cap you will be directed to the Afrihost control panel to top up your bandwidth;
• if you ever want to cancel your account you will have to give Afrihost 1 month’s notice (I suspect other providers like Axxess have the same notice requirement so bear this in mind if you want to leave your current provider for Afrihost); and
• the special offer was supposed to end today but the call centre guys have been told to keep selling the cheaper packages for the time being.

There is no doubt the Afrihost offer will attract a number of new customers. I am seriously tempted by the 50GB package at R1 450. It is cheaper than my bandwidth at Axxess is costing me for a lot less and given my current usage, 50GB is practically uncapped for me. Another big plus is that Afrihost’s ADSL allows for 5 concurrent connections and if I understand that correctly, that means my family can also use my account for their DSL needs. That translates into an even lower cost all around.

The Afrihost guys seem to be pretty confident that they have shaken up the local ADSL industry and they probably have. It remains to be seen what the post-special offer price will be although I doubt very much it will be much more than around R49 per GB which is what G-Connect is charging for ADSL on the high end.

What is clear is that pricing ADSL at anything more than R59 per GB for simple ADSL is foolish and we should see other providers drop their pricing sooner rather than later. Either that or those providers will start to fall away as serious competitors.

That just leaves you with one question. Have you signed up with Afrihost yet? I’ll be exiting the Axxess offramp shortly after about 2 years as an Axxess customer.

In a way our trip to Mtunzini to visit the Seacom landing station on 28 May 2009 was a great analogy for the Seacom cable’s impact on South Africa’s degree of connectivity to the Internet. It took us about 2 hours to fly from Johannesburg to Durban and back again and about double that amount of time in a bus travelling to the presentation in Ballito, the site itself and back to Durban International. Put another way, South Africa is poised to boost its bandwidth more than tenfold from its current capacity when the Seacom cable goes live in the coming months. This is a big thing for South Africa although it isn’t quite what the hype has led us to believe.

The hope has been that when someone flips a switch at the end of June 2009 we will see prices drop by an order of magnitude; we will all be able to view YouTube videos without buffering first; Telkom’s monopoly will be thwarted and we will have abundant bandwidth, government will operate efficiently and honestly and all will be right with the world. Unfortunately many of these hopes will be dashed and the immediate effect of the Seacom cable going live will be more gradually felt in South Africa.

That being said, the Seacom cable will eventually facilitate a very different Internet experience for a great many South Africans who should see prices for their data drop noticeably. There have already been a number of price reductions, probably in anticipation of Seacom’s arrival, so we can realistically expect prices to drop a further 40% or so from their current levels in the coming months and years. The shift to a fibre connection from a predominantly satellite connection should mean better quality connections which more technical people can explain using terms like latency and so on.

Aside from the eventual benefits, I found Seacom’s CEO Brian Herlihy’s talk about open access particularly appealing. While some of his presentation is what you would expect from a marketing pitch, he spoke quite passionately about how the Seacom cable’s tremendous bandwidth could help under-serviced communities leapfrog older connectivity options and reap the fruits of a high-speed Internet connection. He talked about communities in Rwanda laying fibre optics cables inland which will help transmit the cable’s 1.28tbps (terabits per second) to schools, villages and cities. This kind of connectivity could be the catalyst for an African Google and create a truly level playing field where Africans can better compete with the rest of the world.

Another thing the Seacom cable may well help achieve is a shift in mindsets about Africa and its data usage. Africa is apparently perceived largely as a “voice” market because data is traditionally too expensive for widespread adoption. The cable could help change this through reduced data prices. It also helps that the African countries who will be fed by the cable have committed to its success.

In South Africa powerhouses such as Tata, Neotel and Internet Solutions are “anchor tenants” and our mobile networks are in the process of establishing the infrastructure necessary to tap into this firehouse when it turns on. We may not see price reductions right away but the industry is definitely about to change dramatically. This degree of broadband will also mean a different experience of the Internet. As Herlihy put it, “real broadband is about dynamic media”, not just web pages and embedded videos.

There are a number of unrealistic expectations of the Seacom cable and, at the same time, a tremendous amount of promise. It will change our Internet consumption patterns (barring even more collusion from the networks and more rampant profiteering at any rate) and quite possibly change the South African economy itself.

Take a look at Mr Chetty’s post about the Seacom media event for more information about the trip and the cable itself while you’re reading about Seacom. Great post!

MTN is feeling a little backward lately. The outages on the network (which may or may not be Telkom’s fault) are just part of the mix. It also seems that Vodacom has managed to snag all the cool devices that are heading this way. One good example is the iPhone 3G which Vodacom secured the right to distribute when it came out last year. This morning I read that Vodacom is the network you need to go through to access Facebook Mobile.

Ok, this isn’t exactly the death knell for MTN but it is another indicator Vodacom is the network for the cool new gadgets and better access to social services on the Web. This may be due to Vodafone’s stake in Vodacom (Simon Dingle or Duncan McLeod can better speak to those things than me) but whatever the enabling mechanism, all I get from MTN is offers of crappy phones when I am due to upgrade and an average service.

I think I am due for an upgrade soon and I am starting to think about moving across to Vodacom. The one thing that holds me back is that I have been told that MTN has a lower subscriber density (or whatever the term is) and I believe MTN is currently building trenches and building capacity. If only I could get better than EDGE connectivity in my house …