Looking after consumers
Theo Boshoff
A new company called IPINX has been created to assist consumers in getting the benefits of the long-promised internet bandwidth and lower bandwidth costs as a result of the new Seacom undersea cable, reduced prices of the SAT-3/SAFE cable system as well as other local fibre channels across the country.

Businesses have already seen the benefits of all of these initiatives of bandwidth improvements and cost reductions, but very little, if any, has really trickled down to the consumer.
IPINX is an initiative that enables internet service providers (ISPs) to pass on these benefits of more affordable local and international bandwidth to their customers by offering wholesale benefits on to the smaller ISPs and hence on to customers.

Marius Oberholzer, CEO of IPINX, says the company will offer service providers access to a range of broadband access mediums on a wholesale basis, namely scalable Telkom IPC/ADSL, iBurst, and Metro-Ethernet, as well as international transit through the Seacom cable, connecting to Level3 in the UK. If needed, international transit can also be arranged through SAT3/SAFE if required.

Basically, IPINX will provide smaller ISPs with sub-STM1 level bandwidth at 155Mbps, and give them the freedom to structure and package this to consumers and subscribers as they wish. Oberholzer hopes that this will also spark innovation within the smaller ISP arena to come up with completely new ideas and services to consumers using the increased bandwidth speeds and more affordable prices.