mydigitallife

Interestingly The Source's arch nemesis, at iBurst are set to try and turn their flagging reputation with the masses well not really the masses, more like the very few folks who have existing privately owned copper wire infrastructure.

Mr Van Zyl said that the iBurst Business’s 20 Mbps ADSL2+ solution will be around R400 per month while the company will also offer 5 Mbps, 10 Mbps and 15 Mbps services available at lower rates. Subscribers purchase ADSL2+ data bundles to suit their needs with the significant advantage that there is no forced analogue voice line rental which has been the bugbear of the South African telecoms consumer for many years now.

iBurst launches ADSL2+ – itNews Africa

This new development will be available to users in office parks, shopping centres and gated residential communities with privately owned telecommunications infrastructure. So hard luck this is not going to be an option for you the, poor guy and gal on the street for quite some time yet, but is surely is a step in the right direction. 

This move is ultimately a pre-cursor to LLU or Local Loop Unbundling, this will be a regulated move that will allow telecommunications competitors to make use of each other's (Telkom's) "last mile" copper infrastructure. This is based on the premise that existing infrastructure built under a monopoly makes competition for some services such as ADSL impossible as the cost involved in building the infrastructure is just not reasonable. This has successfully been implemented in North America and the EU and is apparently on it's way here by 2011.

As far as I can tell what this will mean is that competitors will be able to make us of existing lines from local exchanges which has long been part of Telkom's stranglehold. All in all this is win-win for the consumer as it finally may give the consumer a real choice.
The optimist in me says Roll on 2011!