http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/business/-/2560/657300/-/5hfuqgz/-/index.html
Better deals beckon as ISPs benefit from cuts By ESTHER NAKKAZI Posted Monday, September 14 2009 at 00:00 The arrival of high-speed Internet in Uganda has finally been matched by price reductions to Internet service providers. By last week, some ISPs were purchasing capacity at $650-$700 per Mbps, a sharp drop from the $2,000 for the same quantity of bandwidth from satellite. But this price is for short-term contracts. For clients who signed long term contracts of up to 20 years, like Infocom, the price is much lower at $150 per Mbps. Infocom is the sole capacity reseller for Seacom and Uganda Telecom. Infocom chief executive Hans Haerdtle said the 20-year contracts involve an indefeasible right of use — a contract agreement between operators of a submarine communications cable or a fibre optic network and a client who is allowed the resale rights. Internet users are optimistic that as more ISPs connect to Seacom the price will go down for customers who are currently experiencing high speeds but at previous high rates. According to Mountbatten Ltd director Reinier Battenberg, once ISPs sign up with Seacom, the competition would be similar to the telecoms war for customers, which would see prices go down. "We are waiting for competition. After that, it will just be a matter of time before prices are slashed," said Battenberg. Seacom is a privately funded broadband submarine cable that will connect communication carriers in South and East Africa to global networks via India and Europe. We have started migrating our customers to fibre. The price will not change but we shall double the connection speed," said Mark Kaheru, Uganda Telecom public relations manager. This is the trend with all companies that have migrated their customers to fibre so far. "We have been on broadband fibre connection for a month now. The speeds have gone from 64/64 to 512/512 which is sustained for 24 hours in a week with limited outages," said Simon Vass technical manager E-Tech Uganda Ltd, also a customer of Infocom. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Seriously tho, prices are not going to fall anytime soon (if at all). The revenue stream is just too juicy! -- Cheers, McTim "A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how we get there." Jon Postel _______________________________________________ LUG mailing list [email protected] http://kym.net/mailman/listinfo/lug %LUG is generously hosted by INFOCOM http://www.infocom.co.ug/ The above comments and data are owned by whoever posted them (including attachments if any). The List's Host is not responsible for them in any way. ---------------------------------------
