MyBroadband Awards 2012 winners

The 2012 MyBroadband awards were handed out during the company’s annual conference at Vodacom World today (10 October 2012), rewarding the top performers in South Africa’s broadband and telecommunications market over the last 12 months.

The awards are based on two surveys which attracted over 20,000 responses from South African consumers and industry players.

Data from the MyBroadband speed test server and pricing data were also used to select the winners in the broadband categories.

Honorary awards

This year MyBroadband replaced the customary “broadband maverick of the year” with two honorary awards to pay respect to individuals who had a significant impact on the South African broadband environment.

The first honorary award went to former MWEB CEO Rudi Jansen for launching affordable uncapped ADSL services, and through this initiative changing the South African broadband landscape forever.

The second honorary award went to former Vodacom CEO Pieter Uys for his role in driving innovation in the mobile broadband space, and for making South Africa one of the leaders in the mobile broadband space.

Pieter Uys at the 2011 MyBroadband Conference — Pieter Uys

IT person of the year

The 2012 MyBroadband IT person of the year is Alan Knott-Craig. He was a runaway winner in this category, notching up well above half of all the votes.

Knott-Craig is busy transforming Cell C, and as part of this process he slashed the prices of mobile calls and mobile data.

Fixed broadband service of the year

Telkom’s 10Mbps ADSL service won the best fixed broadband award, comfortably beating competing fixed wireless services from Neotel and iBurst.

Mobile broadband service of the year

In one of the closest contests ever, Cell C beat 8ta by less than 1% to win the award for best mobile broadband service of the year.

New Cell C head office image — New Cell C head office mock image

ADSL ISP of the year

In another very close contest, Afrihost won the 2012 ISP of the year award ahead of rivals MWEB and Web Africa.

Mampara of the year

ICASA is not the most efficient regulator around, and Government is continuing to hamstring Telkom with their shenanigans.

But the eventual loser – partly because of dragging its feet with handing out LTE spectrum, its dubious finances at the ICT Indaba, and for not doing enough to assist the telecoms industry – is The Department of Communications.