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ADSL offerings have recently seen a rise in local only ADSL accounts. A growing demand for affordable broadband connections has spurred ISP’s to expand their ADSL offerings. But what is a local only ADSL account and does it have any real advantages?

 

As the name suggests local only ADSL does not allow users an international bandwidth. Users are limited to sites located on South African servers only. While this does make local only ADSL a bit useless for general surfing and downloading, it does come with some advantages.

 

For many users the price is the greatest advantage. Local bandwidth is nearly ten times cheaper than international bandwidth making local only accounts much more affordable. But despite the more attractive price local only ADSL needs to offer a little more to make it an option for personal and business use. Luckily local ADSL can still be used for a surprising number of bandwidth intensive tasks:

• Voice Over IP (VOIP) can still be used with a local only ADSL account. The majority of VOIP services connect to a local server before relaying the call over the Internet.
• Virtual Private Networks allow local offices to connect to each other. Since all the offices are located in South Africa, local only bandwidth is more than enough (and affordable) to keep the connected.
• Local only accounts can also be used to host dedicated mail servers and a lot of small and large businesses are starting to take advantage of this.
• Gamers can also benefit. As more and more servers come online in South Africa, local only accounts will soon be a viable option for the online gaming fanatics.
• Local only accounts can also be used for peer-to-peer (P-2-P) and file sharing. Just as game companies are introducing more servers to South Africa, so too are mirrors and file sharing servers starting to become more prevalent.

For those users who use the Internet to do their banking or some local online shopping, local only ADSL accounts are more than enough. Local only accounts may not allow users to surf the web all over the world, but it can still have a great variety of local uses that have nothing at all to do with surfing the Internet.

 

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