MWEB to boost uncapped ADSL capacity and redundancy

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

Full Profile

E-mail

MWEB invests in further infrastructure to support its uncapped ADSL services, but concerns remain about last-mile infrastructure

During the past three months MWEB has made significant investments to cater for the lack of IPC capacity.

MWEB explains that although Telkom has made efforts to supply them with all its IPC needs, all of the requirements could not be delivered in time before the network freeze around the Soccer World Cup. This is mainly a result of the pent up demand that was unleashed with the launch of uncapped services.

As a result, MWEB moved a portion of their customers back onto Telkom’s SAIX wholesale network to ensure their customers continued to receive a fast and reliable experience. This temporary migration has come at a considerable cost to MWEB.

Rudi Jansen, MWEB CEO comments: “This is three times more than the cost of keeping customers on our own network – money that we would have gladly spent on additional capacity on our existing network if it were available.”

Subsequent to the World Cup network freeze period, Telkom has embarked on a major network build and the first available IPC will be delivered in Cape Town. As a result, MWEB has invested significantly into new equipment to enable the additional IPC capacity for their subscribers.

“We are happy to make this investment in the best interests of our customers. We wanted to bring permanent change to internet usage in this country and we have achieved the first part of our goal,” said Jansen.

The investment in Cape Town will also be used to bring additional redundancy into the network, to mitigate the effect of any major network failures. In addition, more IPC will come on stream towards the end of November in Johannesburg. MWEB is now the first ISP in South Africa with significant IPC capacity in both Johannesburg and Cape Town. MWEB will also land additional international bandwidth in Cape Town. This will further enhance redundancy in the network.

When additional IPC capacity comes on stream in Cape Town mid-September 2010, MWEB will start migrating customers that are currently on the SAIX network back onto their own network.

“The migration back onto our own network will enhance the regular Internet user’s browsing experience,” adds Jansen. “The migration will take effect over a few days to ensure stability in the network and ensuring optimal network performance for the end user.”

An added benefit of the Cape Town based IPC service will be that MWEB anticipates latency for Cape Town based users to improve.

Although, MWEB will keep on investing in its own network capacity at regular intervals, Jansen remains concerned about the last-mile infrastructure.

“We are aware of numerous ‘hotspots’ at exchanges around the country where users are getting vastly different experiences. This problem has been further compounded by the recent upgrade to a 10Mbps service on certain exchanges. More investment in last mile infrastructure is needed to make South Africa a broadband state and MWEB will keep on working towards that goal.”

MWEB to boost uncapped ADSL capacity and redundancy << Comments and views