The only quick way the second national operator (SNO) is going to gain any serious market share is by rolling out a wireless infrastructure, says a Johannesburg-based company that monitors emerging technologies.
WiMax technology provides the perfect opportunity for the SNO to bring to market an effective wireless technology that has good building penetration, low latency, good download speeds and transmission tower ranges of 60km, says Nic Laschinger, MD of The Next Big Thing.
Laschinger believes that by the time the SNO is up and running in the next nine to 12 months, WiMax will be well enough established to be introduced locally and is already being tested by Telkom.
"In the past few months new WiMax standards and products have been certified and released to market and the technology has received strong support from Intel, which are strong indicators that it will be successful," he contends.
WiMax also received support at the most recent World Summit on the Information Society, which identified the technology as the likely solution to the fact that 1.5 million villages in the world are still without telephone access.
"A WiMax infrastructure could be used to deliver not only voice communications, but also TV over IP and true broadband Internet access at an affordable price," says Laschinger.
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