ADSL price war triggered

Johannesburg - Internet service provider group WirelessG has dropped its ADSL prices by 25%, ahead of the launch of undersea cable Seacom on Thursday.

Seacom runs up the east coast of Africa delivering 1.3 terabits per second of bandwidth to the continent.

It was scheduled to go live in June, but this was postponed because of piracy threats off the African coast.

Said CEO of WirelessG, Carel van der Merwe, "I do think Seacom will have a positive effect on the market, but it will not be the cure-all. For really amazing cost reductions, service providers will have to re-engineer their business processes and look for efficiencies they're not currently exploiting."

According to Van der Merwe, the price drop sees WirelessG's prepaid ADSL access rates decrease from 6.5c per MB to 4.9c per MB; during its happy hour (between 17:00 and 20:00 daily) prices will drop to 4.5c per Mb from 4.7c per MB.

"That's a 25% decrease over our previous normal rate," he said.

- Fin24.com