Telkom last week held a press briefing in anticipation of the Icasa hearings on how ADSL service should be provided in South Africa. The hearings will take place from Wednesday to next Monday at Icasa"s offices in Sandton.

According to new product development manager, Steve White, Telkom"s approach to the hearings, and the bulk of its submission, will center around determining why it is being targeted.

White states that the complaint that resulted in the hearings being scheduled was filed in February 2004 (by MyADSL founder Rudolph Muller). "Since then," White says, "Telkom has resolved the issues we initially had, due to our miscalculating the bandwidth that we would need on our international pipe. We invested heavily in caching, protocol shaping and IP modelling to improve speeds without increasing the cost to customers."

"We have also introduced new products, reduced our prices, and seen competition from Sentech, Vodacom and WBS iBurst since the launch," White says. "We believe that if the complainant had been privy to exactly what has been going on at Telkom since we launched ADSL, we would not be having the hearings."

The company today also increases its international bandwidth requirement on a monthly basis, in proportion to the number of new installations per month, White adds.

The initial complaint was lodged in response to high line rental costs, and lack of guaranteed minimum service levels, something the company has not necessarily directly addressed, however. And, while there is competition in the market, as per White"s comment, local consumers still do not have access to the wide range of broadband products and services available in deregulated overseas markets.

In any event, given the number of users scheduled to make submissions at the hearings (some 30 individuals as well as Muller, MTN, IS, The Internet Society and MWeb) Telkom can expect to have a hard time next week.