It appears that South African Fibre users may be in for a bit of good news if a recent Business Insider report is to be believed. According to the report, Telkom has reached an agreement over the Competition Commission’s data services market inquiry report published last year, which was also what forced the likes of Vodacom and MTN to drop their data prices after it found excessive pricing and overcharging across all of South Africa’s major network providers.
While the report doesn’t detail exactly how much Telkom will be reducing the fees they charge on their fibre network, it is believed to be a substantial reduction with Business Insider claiming people could be paying as much as R100 to R200 less a month for their different fibre products as a result.
While Fibre was widely believed to have freed the national networks from the monopoly of Telkom, the company was still able to build the largest fibre network in the country with the majority of other fibre companies and internet service providers such as Afrihost, Axxess and MWeb forced to rely on the use of Telkom’s network in some way or another. This news also applies to every fibre user, even those that don’t make use of Telkom’s services, as they could also see a drop in prices over the increased competition and the fact that most ISPs simply built this overhead cost into their prices.
It’s unclear exactly when these price reductions will take effect, though consumers should start to see the effects of it within the next few months. Considering the country is relying more on the internet than it ever has before, hopefully this change will make it easier for many households to afford fibre products.
Last Updated: April 15, 2020
JWT-80
April 15, 2020 at 16:07
This is good news 🙂
HvR
April 16, 2020 at 11:15
Telkom-Openserve can keep their fibre line right there on the pavement not switching from Vumatel.
They still use GPON, which means you are going to end up with 1:64 contention ratio as more people sign up. Why the hell do want to go back to ADSL days of inconsistent speeds during peak time?
And that also answers the question how they can be reducing the fees.
MechMachine
April 16, 2020 at 11:52
Vumatel isn’t perfect. I have just as many issues with my line with Vuma / Cool Ideas as I did with Telkom. The customer service is incredibly inept. Open ticket. First thing they ask you to do is a redundant speed test.
But, I agree that going with them is probably better than Telkom. I do enjoy the benefits of no cap and being able to download 50 gig games in no time at all most of the time.
HvR
April 16, 2020 at 11:56
No service is fool proof, especially if along the line there is a fool with a shovel involved.
You customer service is pretty much determined by your ISP, I can understand this because it will cost Vumatel an exorbitant amount of money to be the first port of call on an open network.
Also ISPs love blaming the line provider first where the issue is most probably with them. Sadly it seems Cool Ideas grew to quickly to keep up their customer service.
But I’ve got it worse I fell for the Cfibre sales pitch and believed them that the dedicated fibre customer support would be in place. Every single time they blame VT but as soon as you run a traceroute you see the wheels are coming off at the CellC exchanges except for once when it was a couple of VT fibre switches that blew up due to loadshedding which was repaired 24 hours later.
MechMachine
April 16, 2020 at 12:06
When I switched over to my one gig line, it took Cool Ideas a week took figure out some technical issue that prevented me from getting online. A week. They blamed Vuma. I phoned Vuma, they Blamed Cool Ideas. Eventually, that Saturday after waiting since Monday for the line to start working I phoned some tech guy on the Cool Ideas Side. We sat on the phone and figured it out ( He did ). I would not let it go until my internet which I had already paid for that month was sorted.
It’s easy to pass the buck and go home for the night. Somebody else will fix the problem.