According to Jonathan Maliepaard, the managing director of eNetworks, the South African enterprise networks services provider and ISP, the recent exuberance expressed about the uncapped rate might be short lived when they realise that they might not be getting the same performance that they had before.
"It is simple mathematics-infrastructure and bandwidth cost a lot and the only way to make an uncapped service sustainable is to make lots of clients share the same bandwidth.
"ISPs have been doing this for years, but it was easier to do when you were being paid for what you used. Now the playing field has changed and massive oversubscription ratios and caching will be the only way to survive.
"What is boils down to is that there has to be a trade off. An uncapped, use-as-much-as-you-want model means a sacrifice in performance. As pay-as-you--use model is more predicatable for the ISP and will be better performance.
"It has been proven that the pay-for-use model is actually a premium model in some countries. Therefore if you do not need to download lots of movies/music content and you are working real-time, then you want a pay-for-use product.
"The 4 Mbps uncapped products are selling for around R500 now, but the same amount of money will buy you 10 Gbps of bandwidth at most ISPs, which is more than most individuals will use in a month.
"This sudden change is, in my opinion, not going to be healthy for the industry and will hurt many ISPs caught between Telkom and the consumer, who are reselling Telkom's services at cost for close to it and have no room to move now.
"Let us hope that they can hang on until Telkom answers the offering from MWEB and internet solutions. The larger ISPs, who have managed to get the funding to purchase bandwidth on the Seacom cable, now have to pay for it. "
Click here to read the full Business Report article (PDF).
No comments:
Post a Comment