MTN Business has effectively cut the cost of bandwidth by up to 50%. The company, a subsidiary of mobile telecommunications group MTN, has said customers with 2Mbit/s and faster connections will be able to claim up to 50% more bandwidth for the same price.

“There is already a disconnect between the amount of bandwidth customers require and the amount of bandwidth they can afford, and that pent-up demand will only increase in 2010 onwards,” says MTN Business CEO Angela Gahagan (pictured).

The cost efficiencies achieved through the recent merger of MTN Network Solutions and Verizon Business — MTN acquired the latter earlier this year — have allowed the company to increase the bandwidth allowances, the company says.

The additional bandwidth is not available to customers using line speeds below 2Mbit/s as this is “not technically feasible”. It is also not available to ADSL customers, but rather to corporate customers who use Diginet lines.

The increased bandwidth will be available to MTN resellers, including other Internet service providers. Gahagan says bandwidth allocations will continue to rise in the next few years as new undersea and national fibre projects come online.

MTN Business has bought capacity in Seacom, which runs along Africa’s east coast, and is also an investor in the two other cable systems that are in development, the East African Submarine System (Eassy) and the West African Cable System. The company has acquired bandwidth on Seacom as a redundant route to the Sat-3 system on the west coast.

Gahagan says the new bandwidth offerings are not a result of Seacom, but rather internal efficiencies. When Eassy goes live next year, Gahagan says MTN Business will switch to using that cable system, instead of continuing to purchase capacity on Seacom.

The new MTN Business bandwidth offerings are available immediately. — Duncan McLeod, TechCentral