The company is currently on the auction block because it no longer fits into the broader strategy of its parent, MIH Holdings - part of media group Naspers - that wants to focus on online content platforms.
World Wide Worx MD Arthur Goldstuck says MWeb has a clearly stated intention of building its own network, "so that they can move away from reselling other telcos` services and become a first-tier access provider and eventually telecoms operator in their own right - a strategy MWeb Business Product Management and Development manager Jansen van Rensburg" rel=tag>Herman Jansen van Rensburg confirms.
"Once you can sell a number, then you are a telco," says Jansen van Rensburg. "That`s the ultimate everyone is trying to get to."
MWeb is now 11 years old, having started out selling dial-up Internet subscriptions in 1997. Since then, it has added ISDN, ADSL, 3G, hosted exchange, Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) and has experimented with WiMAX.
As from the beginning of the month, the company is also offering what Jansen van Rensburg calls MTalk, "which is us reselling Vodacom voice contracts.
Jansen van Rensburg says the move "closes the loop" on the company`s offerings in that they now offer a full range of data and telephony services. "It`s another piece of the puzzle. We also do VOIP, so the only thing we didn`t do is mobile voice, it is the last addition to a portfolio of data and voice services and it is what customers are looking for... not just for the sake of it. They want a converged telecoms provider, that`s what it came down to.
"Whatever you need for telephony we can now supply you and the same for data," he adds. "The whole market is going that way. Customers are saying they want to deal with one vendor. As customer requirements become more blurred between data and everything else, you start offering solutions that equally diverse to satisfy the customers requirement," Jansen van Rensburg says.
Although Jansen van Rensburg claims MWeb is the first ex-ISP to enter the telecoms space in this manner, he concedes the rest of the pack is doing the same.
"I guess it`s a race of who gets it right first and how well they do it... We are all trying to do the same thing. We do a lot more marketing than some other ISPs which gives us quite a bit of leverage."
Jansen van Rensburg notes that the telcos are burning the candle from the other end by migrating into the ISP space. "It`s a tricky thing to get it right.
"The advantage for us is that we`ve long been an ISP and a lot of the complexity lies there. We have a lot more value-add in the Internet space that we can offer customers that the telcos don`t have, like hosted exchange, as an example."
"They have not focused on that. It is not a simple thing, it is not plug-and-play, while we can take their services and resell it because it is relatively straightforward, says Jansen van Vuuren.
"Bundling hosted exchange and mobile phones is not that easy for them to do, but for us... we`ve been doing it already. We`ve been supporting our customers on how to configure mobile phones, which phones work and which don`t, we know how to set up hosted exchange."
Returning to the subject of MWeb emerging as a telco in own right, Jansen van Rensburg says the company is already positioning itself. It is also closely watching technological developments.
"We don`t want to wait till that comes along before getting ready, that`s why we`re getting into telecoms now. Get in, understand it, learn from it, grow from it, determine how you can better do it in future, then when the opportunity comes along, then you are better geared for it," he says.
"If they license more cellular providers, or if we can supply the same mobile voice over a different network, the options are endless... there`s WiFi, all sorts of technologies you can start doing mobile voice on."
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