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.
I’ve been using Axxess DSL for my ADSL access since I first started using ADSL a couple years ago. We use a lot of data and average between 20GB and 25GB on good months. The price per GB isn’t too bad (I pay R59 per GB) and it is very easy to top-up my account … perhaps a little too easy.
There are times when I wonder just how my data is being monitored and how it is I manage to use so much. This morning is a good example. We hit our latest cap last night and I added 1 GB this morning. I did a little browsing and email before I had to rush out for a couple hours and by the time I got back to my office that 1 GB was gone. It turns out much of that bandwidth was consumed by uploads but I haven’t uploaded much of anything today. I was doing a backup online yesterday morning so the thought occurred to me that perhaps that usage was only captured after I added my 1GB and that effectively wiped that data out.
On the other hand it also occurred to me that there are some funny data usage and billing practices going on at Axxess. Now I have nothing to really substantiate this suspicion and it probably only occurred to me because I was (and am) ticked that I had to fork out for yet another 1 GB.
If anything this highlights the cost of our bandwidth and the syrupy rate of price reductions by our providers despite Seacom and whichever other factors help reduce DSL prices. It also doesn’t help that Axxess (and they tell me, other providers too) don’t really distinguish between local and international bandwidth in their billing (unless you have separate local bandwidth and general accounts – what a pain!). I’ve been using Zoopy for my video uploads for a while now because of the local bandwidth appeal but it turns out that means nothing because Axxess just sees usage as usage, regardless of where it is.
Bottom line here is that I am just a bit ticked off at the cost of our DSL and, more particularly, what I keep spending on DSL. I could probably use it less. I could also stop using so much electricity and start cooking by firelight too but that wouldn’t be nearly as civil. I could re-consider Axxess’ uncapped option but at R2 700 for a 4 MB/sec line that works out to around 45 GB of usage. I’m not quite there yet so that still seems a little to expensive. I am also not keen on dropping my line speed down to 512kbps either. Yech!
I guess I’ll just keep an eye on local DSL providers and if/when a cheaper/better one pops up, weigh the merits of jumping ship. I am already trying out G-Connect (well, when I have credit in my account) so maybe I should look at shifting across there? There are one or two other services in the works which also look interesting. The question is what they will charge and what kind of service they’ll offer.
At the moment the biggest data flow seems to be the data representing money from my bank account to Axxess’ bank account.
