fringsters listen up, I have great news for you!

Vodacom has just finished upgrading a huge section of their network (more than 3300 towers across South Africa) to support 14.4 Mbps Internet speeds. As for the rest of the network you guys will have to make due with the speeds of up to 7.2 Mbps on 3G. The great news is that with speeds of between 7.2 and 14.4 Mbps fring calling and video stream quality on the Vodacom network will be vastly better than on other local networks

A little birdy tells me that Vodacom is also testing 21.1 Mbps HSPA services on their network but this will only go live laters. So it looks like there are only good things to come. Watch this space for progress.

Vodacom 14.4 Mbps internet goes live on 1 May 2010

The launch of the much anticipated Seacom cable into South Africa has for a long time been a hot topic. Some folks thought there would be a price war and others said it would take months to see any price reductions.

Well the good news fringsters is that the price wars have started and this the day before the official launch of the Seacom Cable. The very first contender in the ring, the boys and girls of G-Connect, who today announced that they would reduce their ADSL rate by 25% in anticipation of the Seacom cable launch which is scheduled for Thursday 23 July 2009.

The G-connect “price drop sees prepaid ADSL access rates decrease from 6.5c per MB to 4.9c per MB and during its happy-hour (between 5pm and 8pm daily) decrease to 4.5c per Mb from 4.7c per MB.”

Further good news for fringsters is that if you provision your 3G simcard with G-connect you can surf in 3G from your mobile device at rates far below the standard out of bundle network rate of R2 per MB. The G-connect standard 3G rate is 62c per MB and during their happy hour (5-8pm) it drops to 55c per MB. G-connect is a relatively new player in the market and these new rates are not bad for the new kid on the block if I may say so.

The G-connect team seems to be on the ball at the moment, they recently called me up and offered to send me a preconfigured simcard to trial the service and you can be sure I will let you guys know how the service performs.

Let the price war begin

In 2007 we brought you the news that Neotel, South Africa’s second national operator had signed a contract with SEACOM to land a new sea cable in South Africa by 2009.

Well the good news is that the cable is almost here, according to SEACOM “From June 2009, southern and eastern Africa will finally get truly connected to international broadband networks.”

“Telecoms prices are expected to drop by as much as 90percent by June when major cable networks open up direct broad- band connectivity to Europe, Asia and the US.

The cable has been laid from the edge of the South African waters to Mozambique and cable laying is also proceeding in the Red Sea from Egypt towards the coast of Yemen.

A third ship is currently being loaded with the remainder of SEACOM’s deepwater cable which will be deployed from India towards Africa, where these three cable segments will be joined. ” this according to mybroadband.co.za

The cable which will connect South Africa to Europe and India, will also land in Mozambique, Madagascar, Tanzania, Kenya and UAE.

With a capacity of 1.28 Tbps this cable will bring much needed bandwidth relief to Africa.

We look forward to June with anticipation, bring on faster and cheaper bandwidth for all