ADSL in South Africa has been around since 2003 but uptake by consumers and business was really spurred when the download speed was increased to “up to 4Mbps”. This download speed represented a huge improvement on the 1Mbps product previously available. ADSL was more useful and more applications that required this type of bandwidth encouraged sales along with larger investment in infrastructure roll out by ISP’s and Telkom. Although the download speed was 4Mbps, the upload speed was limited to 384kbps. This is about to change with Telkom conducting trials in March were they have upgraded the upload speed of the 4Mbps product to 640Kbps.

This upload speed increase looks imminent and could be rolled out as soon as April, should the limited trial prove successful in March. This opens the door of opportunity for applications such as VOIP and VPN’s that require syncronised upload and download speeds, and effectively doubles the amount of bandwidth available for these types of services.

ADSL 1Mbps = 384Kbps upload. (Current)
to
ADSL 1Mbps = 640Kbps upload. (Future)