Paul Jacobson

I just received a press release from Emerging Media about an exciting product G-Connect has announced and which is getting a lot of attention on Twitter so far. The interesting bits from the press release (Update: check out background and some more information after the break below):

Sub-Saharan Africans will soon be able to connect to the Internet pretty-much anywhere they are – even while on a domestic or long-haul flight – thanks to a new technology announcement from WirelessG, the company behind SA’s first converged, pre-paid Internet product, G-Connect.

While the technology that will enable in-flight Internet services is depending on Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) approval, it will be provided through an exclusive agreement with US-based Row 44 who is already successfully offering in-flight Wi-Fi Internet to Southwest Airlines, Alaska Airlines and in 2010, through Norwegian Air Shuttle. After extensive testing in the US, the first complete set of hardware will arrive in South Africa shortly. This will be used to setup a ground-based proof of concept (POC) here in South Africa to test the complete solution including the Satellites that will be used for the commercial product.

…

Carel van der Merwe, CEO of WirelessG, says the company is already in negotiations with local airlines, and while the solution is already in POC phase, no information is being released as to which carrier will launch the service first.

Because Row 44’s in-flight broadband system is satellite-based and leverages the extensive Hughes satelllite network, WirelessG and Row 44 will be able to provide African airlines’ passengers with uninterrupted high-speed connectivity in-flight, no matter where they fly—including flights across multiple countries and over water.

WirelessG has successfully integrated its converged billing platform to this new technological environment. This platform, which has undergone extensive testing against the WirelessG converged billing service, will connect via satellite to provide a full range of Internet services such as web browsing, email access, VPN connectivity and web-based SMS.
Van der Merwe says the new solution will dovetail perfectly into G-Connect’s current converged Internet solution and extend the ADSL, Wi-Fi hotspot and 3G Internet access currently on offer from the service into the cloud.

The in-flight Internet service will be available to all passengers on participating flights for a fee, while G-Connect users can benefit from the service as they will be able to use their current G-Connect accounts onboard the aircraft.

“With the G-Connect sign-up process being free of cost and contracts, we are expecting many travelers to utilise the advantage of our in-flight offering,” says van der Merwe.

I don’t have any bandwidth figures (apparently pretty close to hotspot speeds) yet or even prices (update: take a look here for an indication of pricing) for the airborne service (they should be comparable to international inflight broadband prices – Virgin America charges between $6 and $13 depending on flight duration and device type). While this is certainly an exciting development and it bridges the connectivity gap for travellers, I wonder if it is such a great idea for some people, people like me.

I am online practically all the time and getting onto a plane forces me to disconnect and take a break from the flurry of information I expose my poor, under-equipped brain to each day. A flight, as comparatively boring as it can be, is also a forced break and an opportunity to take a break, listen to some music, read a book or magazine (or lots of both using an Amazon Kindle, perhaps) or even get through a full email inbox before the next email avalanche hits. Now that we will have inflight broadband, we are faced with the temptation to stay connected. Having this capability also creates an expectation that we will use it and stay connected to our work, clients and the connected world at large.

I don’t know about you but I’m not so sure that this is such a great idea. At least not for me. You can bet your bottom Zim dollar that I will use give it a go and run a speed test every time, just to see how fast I can do stuff in the air. Beyond that I can see myself turning off the wifi most of the time unless I am on a longer trip and can’t afford to lose the time.

On the other hand, this offering does make G-Connect an even more compelling option for me when I am travelling. I already use it almost all the time when I am out (I still use an IS wifi hotspot account when a hotspot is available) and this will make it even easier for me to connect and remain connected. I may be somewhat of an old fart when it comes to my forced disconnect time but you can be darn sure I will be bitching if I can’t connect when I absolutely have to get something done online!

As Mike Stopforth pointed out (and as you can see from the title of my post), the hashtag on Twitter for the discussion is #gconnectinflight.
Read more…

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.

I’m at the Seacom event at Nelson Mandela Square in Sandton and I thought I would do a quick post here using the bank of computers lined up for our use.  I captured the initial speeches using Qik and my N97 which you can watch below here.

There wasn’t any public wifi available but we did get a chance to use the computers connected to some location in the UK to test out the bandwidth. I was expecting something spectacular but the highest download rate I saw was around 7 or 8MB/sec down. I did see some pretty impressive upload speeds (around half the download speed) but that was about it.

A couple of Seacom’s partners were also there showing off their tech, taking advantage of the Seacom bandwidth. I walked around a little with my N97 to give you an idea what is available at the event:

On the whole it was more about Seacom’s promise but as Simon pointed out when we were chatting, there is still a long way to go before people at home can benefit from all this promise.

I did have a chance to chat to Neil Meintjes who is running Internet Solutions’ Plugg, its consumer facing connectivity solution. I gave Plugg a miss when I took a look at it a short time ago because its ADSL was priced at R79/GB. The price has apparently been dropped to about R65/GB which is still a little high compared to Axxess and G-Connect (around R59/GB and R45/GB to R49/GB respectively) and certainly a lot higher than Afrihost with its current special offer of R29/GB but Neil said he is working on a number of value adds which could make Plugg a lot more attractive as an overall product. I also asked him if he has been sued over the logo which looks a lot like Fring’s. He says he gets that a lot.

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!