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Telkom's freeze on network build during the Soccer World Cup cost MWeb a lot of money, says group CEO Rudi Jansen, but it also forced the ISP into new infrastructure investments sooner.
Jansen says that as a result of the “freeze”, MWeb had to pay at least R29 per gigabyte of data, after temporally transferring at least 50 000 of its ADSL subscribers to Telkom's SAIX wholesale Internet service. This compares to the R19 it would have paid by having them all on its own network.
“However, Telkom really did try to come to the party. Unfortunately, they were not able to supply us with more IPCs [Internet Protocol connections] in Johannesburg. This meant we had to take the second option of taking up more in the Cape Town area, forcing us to make that investment sooner rather than later,” he says.
Subsequent to the World Cup network-freeze period, Telkom embarked on a major network build and the first available IPC will be delivered in Cape Town. As a result, MWeb has invested significantly in new equipment to enable the additional IPC capacity for its subscribers. It also means latency for Cape Town subscribers will improve dramatically.
Jansen says: “We are happy to make this investment in the best interests of our customers. We wanted to bring permanent change to Internet usage in this country and we have achieved the first part of our goal.”
The investment in Cape Town will also be used to bring additional redundancy into the network. MWeb will also land additional international bandwidth in Cape Town.
