ARTHUR GOLDSTUCK: As SA switches to fibre diet, ADSL looks constipated
Once you've tasted fast, you can never go back to slow. That's not an endorsement for recklessness on the roads, but for the experience of true broadband connections to the internet. As the business market moves rapidly from ADSL to fibre, and tastes true speed, it is clear that Telkom's ADSL business is doomed. In the wake of ADSL's collapse, the landline business too will lose its relevance for home and business users. While Telkom does offer fibre to the home, it only did so when small, nimble providers like Vumatel entered the market, suburb by suburb. It has offered fibre to businesses for some years, not that you would know. Now, undersea-cable provider Seacom is seeing this side of its business grow more rapidly than its core business of wholesale connectivity. "Once customers taste 20Mbps they want 50Mbps, then they want 100Mbps," says Byron Clatterbuck, CEO of Seacom. "In our office we have two 1Gbps links - that's 1,000Mbps - for about 95 people. "Yet, once you have that, ...
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