Telkom launches unshaped ADSL offering

By Rodney Weidemann for Telkom

Johannesburg, 02 Jun 2004

Telkom has launched a new version of its TelkomInternet ADSL offering, which will provide niche customers with unshaped international bandwidth with a 4GB monthly cap.

The new offering is aimed at users in the high end of the market who require quick response times, notably traders, stockbrokers and gamers, who constitute about 7% of the market.

"We are now able to meet these market needs by supplying a service in which all protocols share the available bandwidth equally," says Telkom product development executive, Steven White.

"The current shaped ADSL service is suited to users who want access for normal Internet usage, as it gives priority to HTTP, the protocol designed for surfing or for retrieving e-mail, but feedback has indicated that higher end customers want access to a wide range of multimedia services."

He says that users of the new service will have to pay for it, as the fact that there is no protocol prioritisation means that Telkom has to supply plenty of extra bandwidth to meet their needs.

"We have listened to our customers and are now catering to that niche portion of the market that is adversely affected by protocol prioritisation," says White.

Telkom is to offer two new ISP packages for this service. Prolog Unshaped will cost R879.30 per month, while Prolog Plus Unshaped will cost R902.30 per month.

The two services differ in the number of e-mail accounts and concurrent sessions a user is allowed, and the amount of personal Web space they are given.

White says that the 4GB cap is set on a monthly basis and is not carried over from month to month, although - like the 3GB service - it is measured on uploads and downloads combined and includes both national and international traffic.

"Once the 4GB cap is reached, the subscriber will be disconnected from the ADSL network. We are looking at bringing in an option to buy more bandwidth in 1GB increments, although we still need to sort out billing issues in that regard," he says.

"We are also making this service available to other ISPs who may wish to buy it from us, add their own additional value and set their own margins, thereby differentiating it from our offering."