Seacom gets fancy in Sandton

I’m at the Seacom event at Nelson Mandela Square in Sandton and I thought I would do a quick post here using the bank of computers lined up for our use.  I captured the initial speeches using Qik and my N97 which you can watch below here.

There wasn’t any public wifi available but we did get a chance to use the computers connected to some location in the UK to test out the bandwidth. I was expecting something spectacular but the highest download rate I saw was around 7 or 8MB/sec down. I did see some pretty impressive upload speeds (around half the download speed) but that was about it.

A couple of Seacom’s partners were also there showing off their tech, taking advantage of the Seacom bandwidth. I walked around a little with my N97 to give you an idea what is available at the event:

On the whole it was more about Seacom’s promise but as Simon pointed out when we were chatting, there is still a long way to go before people at home can benefit from all this promise.

I did have a chance to chat to Neil Meintjes who is running Internet Solutions’ Plugg, its consumer facing connectivity solution. I gave Plugg a miss when I took a look at it a short time ago because its ADSL was priced at R79/GB. The price has apparently been dropped to about R65/GB which is still a little high compared to Axxess and G-Connect (around R59/GB and R45/GB to R49/GB respectively) and certainly a lot higher than Afrihost with its current special offer of R29/GB but Neil said he is working on a number of value adds which could make Plugg a lot more attractive as an overall product. I also asked him if he has been sued over the logo which looks a lot like Fring’s. He says he gets that a lot.