Now there's a contentious title, eh?
It is, admittedly, a bit paraphrased, but let me explain it.
On Friday morning I'd had enough of iBurst's incredibly slow speeds, ludicrous latency, crummy excuses and constant disconnections.
So I wrote an email. And I send it to every single person at iBurst I could find an address for, including Sasan, their Technical Director.
Shaun Green got back to me first. Although he's a really friendly, enthusiastic guy, he seems to play the 'I'm suffering along with you guys' card a bit too much, and he repeated the good old 'the firmware upgrade on the towers should make things better' myth. He also promised to get me some money back from accounts, which was nice.
Then Sasan phoned. Sasan seems to occupy a pretty senior position at WBS, and he spoke with a lot more authority than anyone I'd previously dealt with. He also he seemed incredibly sincere and willing to talk. We chatted for about 15 minutes, and he told me some very interesting things. Below, in point form, is what I can remember about the conversation. Please note that I cannot verify any of this information, although most of it does seem at least slightly true.
1: iBurst do not have a set amount of international bandwidth from their provider. They have a bandwidth on demand system, and their current usage oscillates between 20-60MBps, usually closer to 60.
2: They have just over 2500 users now.
3: MWeb, with 250 000 users, apparently uses 250Mbps of international bandwidth.
This means that, if we average the iBurst bandwidth to 50Mbps, each iBurst user is allocated 20Kbps, as opposed to an MWeb user's 1Kbps. Makes sense if you consider that the average MWeb user has a maximum 56kbps connection, ie: 1/20 of the iBurst top speed. I hope I'm not confusing my bits and bytes on the international bandwidth front here....Basically though, it means that iBurst's contention ratio is the same as MWeb's.
4: Sasan said that network saturation is currently at around 50% average, but he feels that average bandwidth usage will go down in the next few months - he used the analogy of 'showing off a fast new car' to support this.
I disagree. Sure, in the USA saturation is at around 2% for the major broadband players, but they have stronger, faster products, and appeal to a much more mainstream market. Most of the 2500 iBurst users are, and will remain, heavy users. I've been using broadband since InfoSat and MegaWan days, and my usage for last month was still almost 20GB. (It's gone down dramatically this month due to the inability to get more than 2K international using iBurst!)
5: Over 75% of their bandwidth is currently used by P2P. Once they implement the cap and new port-shaping, this will obviously no longer be the case. The new port-shaping should be properly implemented by Monday.
At this point I must say that it makes no sense to me why one would need both. If you have a 3GB cap, then so what if you use P2P to fill it up? Obviously a cap is still needed though, because there's a lot of port 80 traffic that people would resort to once p2p slowed down, like newsgroup binaries, or even some port tunnelling type things.
6: Now for the important part. Sasan would love to turn iBurst into a proper broadband service, with guaranteed minimum speeds of around 256Kbps, etc, etc. Unfortunately, the only thing getting in the way of this is the restrictive cost of international bandwidth. He gave me a couple of bandwidth cost figures in confidence, which scared the be***** out of me. Heck, he could've been lying, but I also remember reading similar figures in a couple of places online. He then said that if SA users really want international quality broadband, they have to take the matter up with Telkom.
While this all makes total sense, I'm left feeling slightly uncertain about something. Doesn't UUNET also supply their own international bandwidth? Are their prices similarly restrictive? Doesn't iBurst use UUNET? Or do they have multi-provider redundancy? Is UUNET totally separate from Telkom?
In any case, it seems sort of obvious to me that if there are only a couple of big international bandwidth providers, and if they're charging the earth for every meagre 64k of dedicated line, then the resellers, like iBurst, are going to have to create very tenuously positioned products.
In summary, and in my honest opinion, iBurst is not a broadband product.
There's a reason why you pay several thousand rand a month for a 128K diginet connection yet only R699 for a '1Mbps' wireless connection, and if anyone is really expecting any 'broadband' provider in SA to offer the equivalent of a 1Mbps diginet line for a couple hundred bucks a month, they've been swayed by misleading advertising and the warm fuzzy feeling they got when they were only sharing their provider with 100 other heavy users.
So what do you all think of this? Will UUNET's uncapped ADSL challenge this paradigm? Will we have to wait for a new international provider? Was Sasan speaking a bunch of bollocks? Is my post way too long?
Later.
It is, admittedly, a bit paraphrased, but let me explain it.
On Friday morning I'd had enough of iBurst's incredibly slow speeds, ludicrous latency, crummy excuses and constant disconnections.
So I wrote an email. And I send it to every single person at iBurst I could find an address for, including Sasan, their Technical Director.
Shaun Green got back to me first. Although he's a really friendly, enthusiastic guy, he seems to play the 'I'm suffering along with you guys' card a bit too much, and he repeated the good old 'the firmware upgrade on the towers should make things better' myth. He also promised to get me some money back from accounts, which was nice.
Then Sasan phoned. Sasan seems to occupy a pretty senior position at WBS, and he spoke with a lot more authority than anyone I'd previously dealt with. He also he seemed incredibly sincere and willing to talk. We chatted for about 15 minutes, and he told me some very interesting things. Below, in point form, is what I can remember about the conversation. Please note that I cannot verify any of this information, although most of it does seem at least slightly true.
1: iBurst do not have a set amount of international bandwidth from their provider. They have a bandwidth on demand system, and their current usage oscillates between 20-60MBps, usually closer to 60.
2: They have just over 2500 users now.
3: MWeb, with 250 000 users, apparently uses 250Mbps of international bandwidth.
This means that, if we average the iBurst bandwidth to 50Mbps, each iBurst user is allocated 20Kbps, as opposed to an MWeb user's 1Kbps. Makes sense if you consider that the average MWeb user has a maximum 56kbps connection, ie: 1/20 of the iBurst top speed. I hope I'm not confusing my bits and bytes on the international bandwidth front here....Basically though, it means that iBurst's contention ratio is the same as MWeb's.
4: Sasan said that network saturation is currently at around 50% average, but he feels that average bandwidth usage will go down in the next few months - he used the analogy of 'showing off a fast new car' to support this.
I disagree. Sure, in the USA saturation is at around 2% for the major broadband players, but they have stronger, faster products, and appeal to a much more mainstream market. Most of the 2500 iBurst users are, and will remain, heavy users. I've been using broadband since InfoSat and MegaWan days, and my usage for last month was still almost 20GB. (It's gone down dramatically this month due to the inability to get more than 2K international using iBurst!)
5: Over 75% of their bandwidth is currently used by P2P. Once they implement the cap and new port-shaping, this will obviously no longer be the case. The new port-shaping should be properly implemented by Monday.
At this point I must say that it makes no sense to me why one would need both. If you have a 3GB cap, then so what if you use P2P to fill it up? Obviously a cap is still needed though, because there's a lot of port 80 traffic that people would resort to once p2p slowed down, like newsgroup binaries, or even some port tunnelling type things.
6: Now for the important part. Sasan would love to turn iBurst into a proper broadband service, with guaranteed minimum speeds of around 256Kbps, etc, etc. Unfortunately, the only thing getting in the way of this is the restrictive cost of international bandwidth. He gave me a couple of bandwidth cost figures in confidence, which scared the be***** out of me. Heck, he could've been lying, but I also remember reading similar figures in a couple of places online. He then said that if SA users really want international quality broadband, they have to take the matter up with Telkom.
While this all makes total sense, I'm left feeling slightly uncertain about something. Doesn't UUNET also supply their own international bandwidth? Are their prices similarly restrictive? Doesn't iBurst use UUNET? Or do they have multi-provider redundancy? Is UUNET totally separate from Telkom?
In any case, it seems sort of obvious to me that if there are only a couple of big international bandwidth providers, and if they're charging the earth for every meagre 64k of dedicated line, then the resellers, like iBurst, are going to have to create very tenuously positioned products.
In summary, and in my honest opinion, iBurst is not a broadband product.
There's a reason why you pay several thousand rand a month for a 128K diginet connection yet only R699 for a '1Mbps' wireless connection, and if anyone is really expecting any 'broadband' provider in SA to offer the equivalent of a 1Mbps diginet line for a couple hundred bucks a month, they've been swayed by misleading advertising and the warm fuzzy feeling they got when they were only sharing their provider with 100 other heavy users.
So what do you all think of this? Will UUNET's uncapped ADSL challenge this paradigm? Will we have to wait for a new international provider? Was Sasan speaking a bunch of bollocks? Is my post way too long?
Later.
