Jonathan Maliepaard, MD of eNetworks, says the biggest hurdle to progress is the cost of bandwidth from the likes of Telkom and Neotel, which is disproportionately high.
"Local bandwidth now costs more than international bandwidth," he comments.
He says when the 5.6 gigabit West Africa Cable System (WACS) undersea cable lands in SA in 2010 the biggest problem will be affordable local bandwidth to access it. "The cost of deploying long-haul fibre is expensive, so the same old big companies are installing it and keeping prices high."
He says another issue is Telkom's monopoly over the last mile , or local-loop copper-wire telephone lines that support ADSL. Either the regular Icasa needs to introduce local-loop unbundling, which would allow other service providers to share this infrastructure, or Telkom needs to provide ISPs with fast, scalable, affordable access to its ADSL network, he says.
Click here to read the full Business Report here.
No comments:
Post a Comment