Telkom ADSL pricing: What you will pay from August

Telkom unveiled their new tariffs recently, which included a price increase on all of Telkom’s ADSL access services. Telkom is also increasing the price of its analogue line rental which forms part of any ADSL service.

The monthly rental fees on Telkom’s DSL products will increase as follows: Fast DSL will increase to R165.00; Faster DSL will increase to R299.00 and Fastest DSL will increase to R425.00.

Postpaid residential and business line rental increase by 6%. The installation charges including postpaid, PrepaidFone, ISDN, and DSL services will also increase by 6%.

However, the monthly rental fees on Telkom’s Do Broadband bundles remain unchanged.

This means that all ADSL customers can expect to receive a higher ADSL bill from Telkom, irrespective which ADSL service they use.

The following table provides an overview of the old and new ADSL rates from Telkom.

Telkom Business boosts uncapped ADSL value

Telkom Business announced today (22 June 2012) that its subscribers will get greater value on their uncapped offerings with significant price adjustments to the internet product portfolio.

South African Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) can look forward to bandwidth increases on the entry-level offerings, and up to 27% reduction in prices on the higher-end usage offerings.

Telkom Business ADSL subscribers on entry level 384kbps and 1024kbps uncapped Internet usage products will be upgraded to 1024kbps and 2048kbps uncapped Internet respectively at no additional cost.

The new prices on usage products and value bundles are effective immediately while speed upgrades will commence automatically from 24 August 2012.

“Telkom Business remains committed to enabling small and medium business customers with high quality internet services. Today, we have not only increased value but we have also slashed prices,” said Thami Magazi, Managing Executive: SME Services.

“Over the last six months, we’ve recorded a 105% increase in internet usage from our retail customers over Telkom Internet. This includes increased activity by small and medium enterprises customers who are integrating high speed Internet into their daily operations.”

Magazi suggested that the increase in fixed bandwidth was enabled by the introduction of high quality uncapped Internet last year which has facilitated the uptake of more sophisticated business applications such as collaborative e-mail, document sharing and web-hosting or cloud storage tools.

These product updates follow the recent announcement by the company on the upgrade of entry-level ADSL speeds to enable new generation consumer content and business applications in a more cost effective manner.

Steve Lewis, Managing Executive of Product House said “based on our customers’ responses, we are improving our uncapped offerings while remaining responsible to the core network products through which we deliver our customer traffic.”

“We are passing on benefits of improved bandwidth pricing and increased value in entry level products into our uncapped usage products,” Lewis added.

New pricing

Telkom’s shaped uncapped offerings have been re-priced as follows:

Value and pricing on TBiz Uncapped Bundles have been adjusted as follows:

* To be upgraded automatically from 24 August 2012 to higher speeds

‘Likes’ aren’t a measure of success

Too many South African brands embarking on social media marketing campaigns believe that the number of ‘friends’ or ‘likes’ they have on Facebook are a measure of the success of their campaigns and the popularity of their brands. This isn’t the case, say local social media and marketing experts.

Jarred Cinman, chief inventor at Native, points out that brand ‘likes’ on Facebook are generally incentivised and do not necessarily indicate brand support. The success of a social media marketing campaign lies in the spread of the message throughout the right networks, the level of engagement that follows, and the positive sentiments this generates, he says.

“In South Africa, we have a very active social media user base that is very engaged. This isn’t matched on a brand marketing level. South African businesses tend to be very conservative and stuck in the old paradigm, focusing on broadcast and print media. Brands and companies are not fully exploiting social media to their advantage yet,” he says.

Using social media effectively takes a whole new marketing mindset, the experts say.

Numbers not a metric

Walter Pike, founder and leader of PiKE | New Marketing, says: “We suddenly think about the audience and realise that, although it may be great to have 10 000 Facebook ‘likes’, it may be better to have 10. The 10 000 could be the lurkers, or not even actually present – they may have clicked the button never to return, while the 10 may be the bridges or the thought leaders.”

Melissa Attree, business development manager at Cerebra, echoes this sentiment: “I’d far rather have an audience of 100 very engaged people in a social network than a thousand ‘likes’ who only visit the page once,” she says.

Handing over control

What is happening now, thanks to social media, the experts say, is that brands are having to find their voices, customers are becoming the branding agencies, and the conversation is no longer with a customer, but with a chain of that customer’s networks, too. Brands can no longer tightly control their messages.

“We start thinking about strategic brand management and we suddenly see that we no longer control the messages, the brand associations nor the media, and realise that we only control the experience with the brand,” says Pike.

Five tech firsts for Olympics

The London 2012 Olympic Games will see several technologies making an appearance for the first time in the event’s history, in areas like communications infrastructure, media and the sporting activities themselves.

Here are five technologies making their debut at the Games, and what they will mean for athletes and spectators alike.

Pay phone

The London Games will be the first to make use of a mobile contactless payment application, being offered by official sponsors, Visa and Samsung. Near-field communications technology has been built into Samsung’s Galaxy S III phone – the “official phone of the Olympics” – which allows users to wave their phones in front of a contactless reader to make a purchase. The app also displays transaction history and account balance, providing customers with greater visibility into what they’re spending and how much money they have left.

The phone, if associated with a Visa card, can be used to pay for items up to the value of £20 anywhere that accepts contactless payments, for any purchases within the Olympic areas. It’s estimated there will be about 140 000 contactless terminals in the country by the time the Games roll around.

MS posts quarterly loss

Microsoft reported its first quarterly loss as a public company yesterday as it took a previously announced hit for writing down the value of its ailing online unit, but held up better than expected in the face of stagnant computer sales.

Excluding the multibillion-dollar write-down, which was signalled earlier this month, and factoring in some deferred Windows revenue, the world’s largest software company actually exceeded Wall Street’s expectations, boosting its shares in after-market trading.

“It looks good, given the dicey economic environment and the weakness we already know about in PCs,” said Brendan Barnicle, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities.

After several years of stumbling behind mobile and Internet trailblazers Apple and Google, and a decade-long static share price, some expectation is building that Microsoft can re-establish itself as a tech leader with its new, touch-friendly Windows 8 system, due out on 26 October, and an accompanying tablet of its own design.

“There’s a lot of anticipation for the next Microsoft products. They are regaining credibility with enterprises,” said Trip Chowdhry, an analyst at Global Equities Research.

Alongside Windows 8 and its new Surface tablet – which it hopes will challenge Apple’s all-conquering iPad – Microsoft is set to release new phone software and a new Web-oriented version of its highly profitable Office suite of applications over the next 12 months.

These, and other products, “will drive our business forward and provide unprecedented opportunity to our customers and partners,” said chief executive Steve Ballmer, in a statement.

Gender diversity lacking in IT

More than a third of global IT companies do not have a woman in an IT management role, and 92% of CIOs are male.These results come out of a study by Harvey Nash, in association with TelecityGroup. The 14th annual CIO Technology Survey 2012 probed the views of 2 400 CIOs and technology leaders in 20 countries.

Harvey Nash’s survey reveals there is growing concern over the question of gender diversity, in particular the availability of female talent in the technology sector, a section the research included for the first time.
According to the results, the male-to-female ratio in IT leadership remains highly unrepresentative of the population at large, as 93% of the CIOs who responded to the survey this year are male, compared with 92% in 2010.
Harvey Nash Group CEO Albert Ellis says the lack of gender diversity is a challenge “for technology companies and IT departments around the world”.
Over a third of CIOs – at 35% ‑ said there were no women in IT management roles in their organisation. In addition, 46% of respondents said less than a quarter of their IT management roles are populated by women.
“Traditionally, all forms of engineering have suffered from an image problem. In the past, female graduates have not aspired to be ‘tech geeks’ and a career in IT has not been seen as attractive,” says Ellis.
Missing out

Harvey Nash director Rob Grimsey says its expectation is that, in the short term, the proportion of female CIOs will remain relatively static. He says, globally, this is about 7% of total IT leadership, which does not represent the population.
“The data suggests IT currently lacks the pipeline of talent, not to mention the female role models, to create the next generation of female technology leaders,” says Grimsey.
Grimsey notes that what is “especially interesting” is that its research shows that nine out of 10 technology leaders believe they are missing vital skills as a result of low representation of women in their teams.
“As IT departments and the technology industry, in general, look to compete in an increasingly global, diverse and user-driven market, the need for diversity, creativity and relationship building has never been more important.”
Ellis adds that technology companies and groups without female representation will miss out in the future, which makes the skills shortage even more acute. However, such high-profile marketplace developments like the up and coming Facebook listing will draw attention to the enormous potential offered by careers in technology, he adds.
Grimsey explains that women generally do not find technology attractive and a supply of talent is at the heart of the problem. He points out that 75% of women CIOs believe there is a lack of qualified women candidates available for technology roles, and 88% of men share this view.