In South Africa, telecommunications is a fast growing sector, coming in thirty fourth in the world when it comes to be the number of people connected to landlines, with millions of subscribers.
Many companies control telecommunications in different countries but in South Africa, there are only two who are in control of the fixed line spectrum. Telkom and Neotel.
ADSL Wireless services from Neotel
Broadband is a difficult sector. When it comes to features like ADSL, Telkom remains the only provider but Neotel has its own license which allows them to offer last mile services to members of the public. What this means is that Neotel has the license to lay the cables to your house or your business. They have rolled out their wireless services in quite a few areas of South Africa already. As you can imagine, the capital outlay for fixed line networks is massive. So Neotel has chosen to go with wireless services which are based on CDMA and WiMax technology.
WiMax does provide outstanding reliability and performance. It is touted as being a good alternative to ADSL, but unfortunately though WiMax is rather expensive for people at home and even for the smaller companies as well. CDMA stands for Code Division Multiple Access. It is a wireless communication technology which enables a few people to use one radio channel, all at the same time.
Made an excellent start already
With Telkom being the telecommunications leader in South Africa, it is not yet certain whether Neotel ADSL will be providing any offerings quite yet until they at least gain a substantial foothold in the telecommunications market and start rolling out their fixed lines to new viable areas. At the moment they are laying fibre out to corporate companies as well as to gated estates and complexes in South Africa.
It is their aim to introduce to the public to a whole variety of voice and data services. This will include high speed internet as well as true broadband access services. This will be provided for small micro and medium industries (SMMEs). They intend to focus on wireless services by convergence, they will offer voice as well as internet access over a single device. This will certainly bring with it convenience and simplicity in telecommunication services. The high speed internet access convergence and the voice services are controlled by Neotel and they also are working towards rolling out their broadband services in various technologies such as WiMax, for example.
Neotel ADSL, the supplier of convenient and simple telecommunications
With Neotel arriving on the telecommunications scene, South Africa has seen more competitive pricing, allowing people to have a choice in their telecommunication services. Neotel also launched their NeoFlex Data multi-user broadband which is a competitor to that of Telkom’s ADSL. There have been tests conducted on the Telkom ADSL packages over the Neotel unshaped ADSL packages and what was discovered was that the Telkom solution experienced cable theft with ADSL whereas the Neotel solution you just plug in. Neotel solution is also cheaper for the month but a 24 month contract is required.
The ultimate conclusion was that Telkom’s ADSL is actually better for users who do streaming audio and video, or gaming online. On the other hand, Neotel proves to be a good solution for customers who want bulk download capacities. It offers better solutions for people like web designers for example who want to upload files over their internet connection. Neotel is busy deploying network infrastructure, promising to bring more capacity for international bandwidth. Subscription numbers continue to grow in the meantime.