Local internet service provider, Cybersmart, is planning to rock the boat with a 100Mbit/s fibre access offering, this year.

Like many other ISPs, the company has been in the business of providing affordable ADSL internet access for the last few years, and has often lead with some of the cheapest products on the market. Its proposed 100Mbit/s fibre solution will also be one of the cheapest offerings of its kind, except it’s perhaps not affordable.

For R9 999 a month the managed service, aimed at businesses, will offer 100Mbit download and upload speeds – and no data cap. Granted, for that price many might expect uncapped usage, but it’s fair to say that at the hands of a few internet pirates a 100Mbit/s line could wreak havoc on network traffic. Providing further value to businesses is the rest of the package, which includes free website hosting, a static IP address, and a virtual PABX with five phone numbers. Call charges to landlines will be 29c per minute, while calls to cellular phones will be 69c per minute – in both cases about half of Telkom’s tariffs.

That said, this new, high-speed offering will only be available in a handful of areas around the country. At launch, in February this year, the service will be available to those within a 10km radius of the Cape Town CBD, in the Western Cape; 10km radius in Umhlanga, Kwazulu-Natal; and 10km radius in Rosebank, Gauteng.

Cybersmart’s offering is the cheapest 100Mbit/s line in the country. According to MyBroadband offerings from other companies range from nearly R43 000 to almost R70 000 a month. Two of those packages have similar service level agreements, at least in terms of contention ratio, but Cybersmart’s price being less than a quarter of existing offerings will help it gain traction among businesses in the areas it services.