International bandwidth price cuts: Real figures

~R60 000 to ~R1500 is impressive. Competition is an amazing driving force. LLU please.
 
But isn't local bandwith is still sold by amounts data not by actual bandwith?
 
so how does the average joe buy a dedicated 1mbps connection from seacom and how much will than cost since we are only buying 1 mbps hence no bulk discount?
 
If I recall correctly you have to buy in 150Mbps slots? But then you still need to the bandwidth to your house... which is where the cheap ends.
 
Interesting it costs just less than R700 for traffic used by 2 4meg users.
 
SEACOM prices

I think we should just remember that SEACOM is getting a preferential rate, so don’t make assumptions on standard wholesale pricing based on these figures. It does however show what impact SEACOM had.

BTW: SEACOM prices are available here
 
I'm holding thumbs that hosting bandwidth allowances and overages will drop in price soon.

I'm with Hetzner and since MTN Business feeds them and they just got their new EASSy feed, I hoping for some good news soon.
 
brettwlewis said:
I'm holding thumbs that hosting bandwidth allowances and overages will drop in price soon. I'm with Hetzner and since MTN Business feeds them and they just got their new EASSy feed, I hoping for some good news soon.
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I am certainly with you on this one. Hosting Bandwidth prices did come down significantly (around 65% I think), but more cuts will be most welcome.
 
mmmig said:
But isn't local bandwith is still sold by amounts data not by actual bandwith?
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HI There,

Just a clarification. TENET does not buy bandwidth by volume, nor does it supply its institutions with bandwidth by volume. Everything is based on throughput speed and is completely volume independent. It also needs to be stated that the rates quoted in the cable are per CIR (Commited Information Rate) and contain zero oversubscription on the international circuit. I.E the speed you buy is the speed you get allocated, with no contention.
 
UCT

I know UCT has a 300Mbps international line. Tertiary institutions do not pay per gb, but purely for the rental of a line at a specific speed. It's really irritating though that at UCT up to Honours level campus users are capped at 300mb and residence students at 500mb. This means that much of UCT's bandwidth, especially at night goes to waste as the TENET graphs will show.
 
ixhd said:
These stats are so badly distorted.

Seacom prices only reach R1500/mbit when you buy in 100mbit + quantities.
Sat3 prices in similar volumes are in the region of R3000/mbit. Which while more, is prone to actually staying online. Something seacom is having a lot of trouble with.

Yet again, R1500/mbit is only for the international transit, the local back haul + IPC are gonna set you back around R4000/mbit on top of it at least.
Also, everyone forgets about the cost of routers, switches, racks, colo space, flow management, staff, support, software/hardware licensingm and all that which will increase the cost further.

By all mean, buy 100mbit of Seacom to your house(R225k/month). Spend the R200k/month to backhaul it from the landing point to your house, another R500k for the routing kit, another R150k to train yourself to use said kit. (There are other costs excluded for simplicity sake).
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Completely agree that these prices do not include any backhaul prices or other running costs, these are the pure international prices. It also needs to be said however, that reducing the costs on one allows more to be spent on the other. The other thing to consider, realistically if you're carrying that kinda bandwidth long term leasing backhaul circuits may not be the way to go, and this is why a lot of companies are running their own fiber. If you get someone like DFA to trench backhaul circuits and can light the fiber yourself, you have virtually unlimited capacity on the fiber and it can be handled as a CAPEX asset. Sure, there is always operational cost on running fiber, but long term, its often far cheaper than leasing capacity from another provider.

With regards to the kit, if you're backhauling 100mbit and spending 500k on routing kit, you're insanely overspending, a J Series Juniper could handle this for < R20k, as could a 2800 series Cisco for < R20k. When you are starting to talk in the gigabits/second range however, its another story, there you start looking at millions. Keep in mind though, that there is a massive jump in what the routers can handle. For example, you can stick to routed switches on the end of a fiber with 10G optics in them for around R150k, that gives you 10G over the fiber. Spent 2 or 3 million though, and you can get DWDM in there and throw up to 1.6 terabit over a fiber, and your cost per gig on the fiber drops through the floor.

It also needs to be said that in terms of this pricing, there is a vast vast difference between providing bandwidth to a home user or to a large corporate or to a university, all three are very different scenarios with very different cost implications and very different models. Even in the corporate market, there are those who would prefer large capex expenditures with low opex costs, there are those on the other hand who would prefer to put it entirely into OPEX and lease everything to avoid the risks associated with asset ownership and management. It all depends on the business model and the business case, and that is different in every organization.
 
Its also important to take into account that these prices are attainable because TENET makes use of the SANReN national backbone network to backhaul all this data across the country. In some institutions (and more to come soon!) SANReN connections are provided free of charge at 1Gbps and 10 Gbps speeds. So in the above model, a lot of the costs are subsidised.

I'm sure you can buy fibre to your house from JINX or other similar points, light it up (even with minimal equipment costs), pay the annual maintenance on the fibre ($$), and buy bulk bandwidth from Seacom, but it probably isn't going to be feasible for small businesses to do that any time soon - never mind the individual home owner. Something that has been spoken a bit about lately is where a consortia of home-owners band together, install fibre in their neighbourhood (increase the value of their property), lease a backbone fibre network from a fibre provider and convince an ISP to provide them with cheaper prices. I think your best bet in getting cheaper international bandwidth is to be part of such a consortia.
 
ixhd said:
These stats are so badly distorted.

Seacom prices only reach R1500/mbit when you buy in 100mbit + quantities.
Sat3 prices in similar volumes are in the region of R3000/mbit. Which while more, is prone to actually staying online. Something seacom is having a lot of trouble with.

Yet again, R1500/mbit is only for the international transit, the local back haul + IPC are gonna set you back around R4000/mbit on top of it at least.
Also, everyone forgets about the cost of routers, switches, racks, colo space, flow management, staff, support, software/hardware licensingm and all that which will increase the cost further.

By all mean, buy 100mbit of Seacom to your house(R225k/month). Spend the R200k/month to backhaul it from the landing point to your house, another R500k for the routing kit, another R150k to train yourself to use said kit. (There are other costs excluded for simplicity sake).
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What does it matter? you have to pay for that whether you take Sat3 or Seacom????
 
ixhd said:
The issue is people start thinking that if 1mbit of transit costs R1500, they can get it at that price through their back door.
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I don't think anybody actually expects that! I've got a DFA fibre running past my flat, but there is no way that I can connect to it, or use any of that bandwidth (yet).

It's about economies of scale, and the volume increase possible once the 'raw' costs come down.
 
Gordon_R said:
I don't think anybody actually expects that! I've got a DFA fibre running past my flat, but there is no way that I can connect to it, or use any of that bandwidth (yet).

It's about economies of scale, and the volume increase possible once the 'raw' costs come down.
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You obviously avoid the parts of the forum where people are frothing at the mouth because they can't run thier torrents at 4mbps 24/7 for R600p/m.
 
Icarium said:
You obviously avoid the parts of the forum where people are frothing at the mouth because they can't run thier torrents at 4mbps 24/7 for R600p/m.
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I have seen those kind of posts (MWeb threads mostly), and always try to point out their folly, but some people don't react logically. Most don't appreciate that economies of scale mean that many other users are trying to access the internet at the same time as them (contention ratios).

I was going to point out this this fallacy with an analogy: Air is free, but if you want it purifed and delivered as oxygen in a hospital you need to pay mega-bucks per liter! The cost of the underlying raw material is always a limiting factor, but only has an indirect relation to prices once it get below a certain threshold. (The same applies to bottled water versus petrol, etc).
 
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