South Africa’s Network Platforms has today launched a new fibre product to augment their existing offerings in the fibre to the business space geared to compete with ADSL services in the market.
According to Warwick Ward-Cox, MD of Network Platforms,“There are inherent weaknesses with ADSL that some businesses want to avoid; Best Effort Service, asynchronous connectivity, higher latency as well as not having a fixed public IP are some of the hurdles for businesses to overcome. Our Fibre products offer low latency, synchronous connections, on an SLA with fixed public IP’s.”
Therefore the launch of the 5 Mbps fibre connection for under R4,000, 10 Mbps for under R10,000 and other packages are available up to 100 Mbps is expected to lower the barrier to entry for companies wanting a fibre service.
The second single biggest hurdle is the time to service and cost of installation. Network Platforms is targeting specific areas to make sure that they can deliver the service within 4 weeks in most cases at a setup fee of around R7,500. This trumps a 4-8 month waiting for service with a relatively high installation cost using other network providers.
The firm is already delivering to Sunninghill, Linbro Park, Rivonia, Bryanston, Fourways, Woodmead, Rosebank and Randburg. The firm added that other business parks are also available and more are being added to the network monthly.
Network Platforms have collaborated with certain Fibre providers to be able to deliver this service. Together with this infrastructure, Network Platforms has built a well-priced, low contention breakout for these SME’s. Dedicated bandwidth is also available on this service.
The 5 Mbps service comes with a generous allocation of data, while a cost will be applied to usage thereafter. The larger packages have larger data allocations in line with their line speeds.
Network Platforms offers a premium 1:1 uncontended and a contended service depending on the client’s requirement with local and international access. Our international routers have full failover as we utilise SAT3, WACS, Seacom and Easy. SAFE will be added in the near future offering much lower latency to the Asia/Pacific region.
Previously, Service Providers could only provide these priced services on inferior bandwidth but we’ve worked hard at being able to deliver a superior quality and service at these price points.