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2007-11-21 - Telecoms competition hotting up
With many new providers offering true alternatives to Telkom’s voice offerings consumers can start to shop around for the best deal.Neotel has announced that they have started to supply their NeoVoice service to customers – which includes a standard telephone number - and have interconnection agreements with all the large telecoms operators in South Africa.
Vox Telecom has also launched their ADSL Phone VoIP service, and they recently concluded an interconnect agreement with MTN which means that Vox customers will be able to make and receive calls from all major operators.
These are however not the only operators in the market.
MWEB’s Broadband Talks and iBurst’s iCall give their subscribers a simple way to save money on their fixed line and cellular calls.
Number portability (NP), which will enable Telkom customers to move to a provider like Neotel and retain their number, is also in the pipeline which will further stimulate competition.
According to Neotel all their systems are in place for geographic number porting and they are only waiting for ‘a few things from ICASA’ before implementing the system.
Competition will drive prices down
One of the gripes from VANS like Vox Telecom and Internet Solutions is the high rates Telkom charges their customers to call other networks – a direct result of Telkom’s high voice termination rates.
Some industry players – who saw this as blatant anti-competitive behaviour - wanted to take the issue to court, but others like Vox Telecom’s Doug Reed said that competition is the way to go to rectify the situation.
While outgoing calls from Telkom to other providers like Neotel, Vox Telecom and MWEB will cost between 59c and 107c per minute, calls between the non-Telkom operators will be significantly less.
On-net calls – calls between subscribers of the same network – from MWEB and iBurst are free while Vox Telecom only charges for these calls during peak hours. Reed however said that they are re-evaluating the situation and it is likely that all on-net Vox calls will become free in future.
Neotel also said that they will definitely not charge the same high fees as Telkom for interconnection or wholesale termination of voice calls.
With a growing subscriber base of alternative telecommunications providers which offer free or low cost on-net calls and far cheaper calls between providers, Telkom may be forced to rethink their strategy. Charging high off-network, local and national call rates is not the way to retain customers.
MyBroadband
21 November 2007
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