Paul Jacobson

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.

Fact: we have expensive Internet connectivity compared to most of the developed world. You can throw a stone at a story about connectivity in SA without grazing a mention of the costs here compared to, say, the UK or the USA. Thankfully we do have developments like the Seacom cable, the upgrade to SAT-3 and a bunch of cables coming down the west coast of Africa which will boost the available bandwidth almost exponentially. We may even see Telkom drop its prices and increase caps and transfer rates … just maybe!

In the meantime we have a couple options that are better priced than most and offer pretty decent service. I used to be a loyal Axxess DSL customer but when it failed to take steps to reduce its pricing after G-Connect dropped its pricing to between R45/GB and R49/GB for ADSL access and Afrihost launched its limited duration and special R29/GB offer, I decided to switch.

I’ve been using G-Connect on and off for a few months now since Emerging Media sent me a SIM card and G-Connect gave me some credit to try the service out. Setting up the account on my laptop was easy with some terrific support from the G-Connect helpdesk. I focussed on the 3G access at first and it worked really well. It wasn’t until I moved away from Axxess that I started using the ADSL connectivity too. While I’ve enjoyed using G-Connect, the sign-on mechanism is a pain in the butt at times. Sometimes it just won’t connect me to the network but the support guys are terrific and I’ve had them call me a couple times with suggestions and to follow up with the support query. There are a couple pros and cons when it comes to the G-Connect service:

• Pro’s
• Pretty fast transfer speeds;
• Unshaped bandwidth;
• A single account for your ADSL, wifi and 3G connectivity;
• No commitment and your balance carries over month to month; and
• Excellent support (the support team are persistent).
• Con’s
• No concurrent connections;
• Cumbersome sign-on mechanism

I heard a couple reports about terrible customer service at Afrihost but the limited duration and special offer was too cheap to ignore. I decided to sign up and try it out and so far I have been pretty happy with the service I have been getting. I initially signed up for a 20GB service at R580 (compared to R490 for 8GB at Axxess) and I am moving up to a 50GB service next month at a cost of R1 450 (compared to the R1 475 I paid Axxess for 25GB). I occasionally have connectivity issues that seem to resolve themselves after a few minutes. As with G-Connect there are a few pros and cons:

• Pro’s
• Pretty fast transfer speeds;
• Up to 5 concurrent connections;
• Minimal commitment, you can cancel at around a month, I think (this is pretty standard);
• Excellent price and if you buy during the special you lock that price in
• Con’s
• Shaped bandwidth;
• No bandwidth carry-over so use it or lose it;
• Reportedly dodgy customer service (although I haven’t had any problems)

At the moment I use both G-Connect and Afrihost. Afrihost is my primary DSL provider but I have credit with G-Connect for when I can’t use Afrihost for some reason or I am out and about and MTN 3G is half GPRS (happens fairly often lately). I also maintain a 1GB data bundle on Axxess as a kind of “in case of emergency break glass” option but I don’t see myself going back there in a hurry. Granted the Afrihost pricing is not sustainable but the R49/GB price point seems to be where ADSL should be priced these days and Axxess’ refusal to revisit its pricing or make any effort to communicate with its customers about its pricing puts me off (Axxess doesn’t seem to be on the social media map and that says a lot to me about the company’s desire to engage with customers).

Of course it is worth mentioning Internet Solutions itself for a number of reasons. For one thing it is the underlying provider that powers Afrihost (as well as Axxess). Another reason is that IS has its own consumer offering called Plugg. Plugg’s offering isn’t terribly appealing from a price perspective. At R79/GB (apparently the price has been or will be dropped to around R65/GB) it is just not an option despite it potentially being pretty zippy due to what I understand are low contention rates (excuse any terminology mangling – I am trying to remember what smarter people in the know have told me). Plugg’s pricing is partly due to its relationship with its customers which it can’t really undercut without causing some trouble (those providers should be cutting their prices but that is besides the point, it seems). Instead Plugg is going to look at ways to really improve the value it adds to connectivity by adding a couple other services and options down the line. The fact that Plugg is an IS product automatically makes it worth watching but until there is better pricing and/or a more compelling offering there are better choices.

While I am talking about IS products I also want to mention its Mobility product. This is a corporate product and analogous to the G-Connect service in that it encompasses wifi and 3G access outside the office. It is a lot more than just connctivity and includes a really comprehensive management system that grants network managers a fine grained level of control over who has what level of access to which network. It seems to be a pretty powerful option for corporates who want to give their people the ability to work remotely and at the same time control how they do that and even how they interface with the corporate network. I haven’t used much more than the 3G connectivity on my phone (like G-Connect you can provision your SIM to run on the IS network rather than your usual provider). I just couldn’t figure out how to get the 3G dongle working with my MacBook for some reason. This mention really doesn’t do the offering any justice. I just wanted to mention it here as a powerful corporate option that also comes with some competitive pricing.

Although pricing has hardly plummeted while bandwidth caps and transfer speeds have rocketed, we are seeing some very welcome relief when it comes to pricing and the flexibility to switch from provider to provider (well, assuming you weren’t nailed down by Telkom or some other larger provider). Even at R49/GB ADSL is becoming much more affordable and providers like G-Connect and Afrihost are putting some pressure on their competitors to do better. I would love to know the number of users other DSL providers lost when Afrihost announced its special offer. That must have been noticeable. I’m pretty happy with my current choices although what I’d like to see is improved upload speeds. That is the next big thing, I think.

I’ve just started seeing reports about the Nokia Booklet 3G netbook. It is a pretty swish looking 10.1″ netbook that will probably sync effortlessly with your Nokia device and provide you with a range of lightweight mobile connectivity options. It looks like a great little product and seemingly part of a strategy designed, at least in part, to challenge Apple head on. Think about it this way: a Nokia netbook that integrates with Nokia devices and offers Nokia services on the go. The one thing that caught my eye: Windows 7 as its operating system. What I can’t determine yet is whether the Booklet 3G runs Maemo, Nokia’s Linux derivative. The promo video is pretty cool actually. Nokia has been putting out some great videos and this one is worth watching:

What does seem clear to me is that Nokia isn’t exactly investing a huge amount of effort into bringing Mac users closer. There is still no plugin for iSync to enable me to connect my N97 to my Mac and while there are options to sync with my Macbook, indirectly, using Mail for Exchange and so on, I am not thrilled. You may remember I ranted about Nokia’s Mac support a little while ago without doing preliminary homework. That led to an apology from me for flying off the handle like that and rightly so. Just the same this paragraph from that post remains true for me:

So why are there still no versions for Mac and Linux users? This is just nuts. If anything Nokia is giving Mac users fewer reasons to buy its products.

My N97 has been doing some crazy stuff lately. I updated the firmware hoping that crazy stuff would stop and it hasn’t. One of the casualties has been Maps 3.0 which has been replaced with a malfunctioning version of Maps 2.0. Besides the fact that I had to find a PC to update the firmware (no option to do this one over the air), I have to get back to a Windows machine to somehow load Maps 3.0 even though the version of PC Suite I had access to for the firmware update didn’t give me Maps 3.0. Now it may be that the Booklet 3G will also come with Maemo or the option to install your own OS but this is unlikely considering the fact that the majority of Nokia’s Ovi services and software will not work on anything other than Windows. Coming on the heels of Nokia’s new alliance with Microsoft, this just reinforces my growing sense that Mac users (never mind Linux users) are just not the cool kids at Nokia’s party.

At the same time I think Nokia is a great company. All the Nokia people I have met are smart, helpful and engaging. Why Nokia continues to snub its Mac and Linux fans is beyond me (and I just don’t accept Microsoft’s OS dominance as the rationale for this any longer). Apple isn’t exactly a model of openness either but does it have to be a choice of Apple or Nokia products? Why is Nokia not reaching out to me and giving me the tools I need to keep using my Nokia devices with my Mac hardware? When you figure that out, let me know.

It turns out Vodafone has reached an agreement with Apple to distribute the iPhone in 10 of Vodafone’s customer countries including South Africa:

Vodafone today announced it has signed an agreement with Apple to sell the iPhone in ten of its markets around the globe. Later this year, Vodafone customers in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey will be able to purchase the iPhone for use on the Vodafone network.

I hope this means we don’t become a dumping ground for older version iPhones while the 3G versions are (hopefully) released next month.  If Apple puts out an HSDPA (or, perhaps even just a 3G) iPhone with an 80GB drive and up, I am there like a bear!  I’ll happily ditch Nokia and move on.  Android devices are only going to really start coming out later this year so we’ll have to wait and see what those devices can do.

I wrote about whether I would want to use a single device or multiple specialised devices a while ago (not sure where I published the post though).  Lately I think I have come round to the single device camp.  I tend to take my iPod with me pretty much everywhere I go in addition to my phone so if there is an iPhone that has fast data access through the mobile network and has enough space to take most, if not all, my media then what more would I need?