Africa INX, a wholesale telecommunications provider and licence holder in South Africa, has launched a broadband Internet service aimed at competing with the growing broadband Internet services in the market.
The service can be provided on fibre or wirelessly and offers the highest bandwidth guarantees available in the broadband category, which is typically regarded as best-effort, highly-contended service with mixed experience and feedback.
Stuart Hardy, Managing Director of Africa INX, comments: "We have never entered the broadband market because, technically, we are a wholesale company and this is a managed service. However, we cannot ignore the growth and shift towards these and similar type/priced services. As such, we will make these products available to the market through our existing 47 licensed clients."
The Africa INX products are priced roughly 40% higher than the Neotel equivalent offering (NeoBroadband) but also come with 300% more bandwidth guarantees, as the contention ratio on these services is guaranteed to never exceed 3:1. Africa INX felt it was important to avoid introducing identical products in terms of what is already available from other companies.
"As a wholesale company, we are not used to selling contended products like NeoBroadband. As a result, we will not be forcing a contention on this product but reserve the right to apply a contention to a maximum of 3:1 if the product is abused. We have allocated a Gig of SAT 3 capacity to the new product, which will take time to fill, so we expect a strong performance overall for the next few years. We are developing our own fibre for these services but will supplement that with Telkom's Metro Clear in areas where we don't have presence," says Hardy.
Africa INX has also indicated that it will extend the broadband concept beyond the Internet and into its national network for VPN (virtual private network) connections where, for a low additional port fee, companies can link these services into a national VPN network for branch-to-branch traffic.
"Once you have the last mile, it's easy and economical to scale it for additional services. For example, companies can expect to pay as little as R300 for an additional 1Mbps of Metro fibre last mile to support services like VPN, voice, video or DR (disaster recovery). It's for these reasons that we have created a broadband VPN solution to complement the Internet offering. In this way, companies can build proper VPN networks without using tunnelling over the Internet and at highly competitive rates," ends Hardy.
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