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Cybersmart takes on fibre market [ITWeb](ITWeb Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Cybersmart sees fibre technology bringing SA "true triple-play services". Local Internet service provider (ISP) Cybersmart has launched a new uncapped fibre product at what it claims is an "internationally comparable price". Unveiled today, Lightspeed is a 100Mbps uncapped fibre service, which comes with the ISP's guarantee of 100% uptime between 7am and 7pm, managed symmetrical bandwidth, one public IP address, free Web site hosting and free cloud-based private automatic branch exchange (PABX). Cybersmart CEO Laurie Fialkov says South African companies lag behind their international counterparts when it comes to the adoption of new technologies like cloud-based services, off-site hosting and video conferencing. "[This is because of SA's] prohibitively expensive" Internet access. Globally, says Fialkov, "ultra-fast Internet access" has brought about innovation in many key growth industries - including the IT, business process outsourcing, financial services and marketing and media sector. He claims, at R11 999, Lightspeed costs a third of the price of its nearest competitor. Customers will be refunded should the company fail to live up to the said 100% uptime guarantee. Telkom (../index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=134161), Vodacom (../index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=68940) and MTN (../index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=134057) - making a play for the fibre market too, Fialkov says the differentiator going forward will be "who is able to innovate and bring compelling services to the market the quickest". "The big telcos have talked about launching fibre services for years. Our service has been launched. We plan to offer better service at an affordable price point." "Previously the big telcos enjoyed a scale advantage because of their ability to subsidise one service with another. Fibre evens the playing field, in that smaller operators are able to offer multiple services on one circuit and achieve similar input costs to the dominant operators." He says Cybersmart is rolling out its own fibre network "where it makes commercial sense". The ISP largely uses open-access fibre providers such as Dark Fibre Africa and municipal fibre operators, he says. To date, fibre deployments in SA have been aimed at medium to large business and upmarket communities, in particular gated communities. But opportunities in the medium term include fibre-to-the-home, says Fialkov. "Fibre lends itself to true triple-play services – data, voice and live video. We will consider crowd-sourcing models to fund fibre deployments to smaller companies." He says Cybersmart is inspired by Google Fibre's model and its success in the US. (c) 2014 ITWeb Limited. All rights reserved. Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (Syndigate.info). |