For some of us at least, the fibre optic cable has been activated at long last. Afcom were operational this morning. Others, if not on already, should be active very soon. Airtel does not appear to be active yet, but I am told it is imminent.

It will be interesting to see how the bandwidth available to ISP's now impacts on prices and speeds. We are at least getting the speed we pay for. Of course, we pay a lot and get comparatively little compared with other countries. Let's hope for some changes on that front before too long.

I hear airtel expect to be active by March 1. So how is it? Really fast? I hear we should not expect prices to co.e down.

It is certainly a big improvement. I think it will be a while before everything is exactly right though. I suspect the original bandwidth limits are in place on the individual connections. Before, there was never enough capacity to reach those limits. So the next stage would be to raise those limits. I would not expect that to happen until things have proven to be stable.

Quite rightly, voice calls are not using the fibre yet. They will want to be sure everything is OK before they are switched. When that does happen, there will be a single point of failure for all SL communication. Let's hope they maintain the backup satellite systems properly.

I see. If I understand what you're saying its like before if we were paying for 1mb you wouldn't get the speeds promised. Now, we're getting the speeds as promised by ISPs but capacity due to ACE has not kicked in yet.

Yes, before you would only get a fraction of what you paid for and usually things would stop altogether during the working day. Hopefully, that sort of thing is in the past. I would hope that the speeds you get per $ will be raised after a while. So if you had 128k then you might get 1MB.

This is just my own assessment and is not based on any real information from the ISP's.

Not much improvement in service and prices have been kept artificially high, so much for competition!!!