Alternative Options

pjvandyk

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South Africa.
I have done some reading on international internet access satellite solutions. There are a few companies providing solutions specificly for africa on the C-BAND. The equipment is quite expensive, for the earth station, 1.8 meter dish and 5W BUC you would pay round about R40 000. For the montly internet access you would pay R3221.76 for the 512k/128k link. These speeds are guarenteed and your internet service will either be connected directly on the us backbone or the european backbone. A few of the companies I checked out were based in Manhatten New York and the internet service hooked up there. Quality of service are compared with ADSL services in the states and europe.

(If you use Sentech VSAT your internet service will be connected in Johannesburg, so maybe this is great for local bandwidth and you still have bad international bandwidth)

So this means you skip the SAT-3 cable, which is our international bandwidth bottleneck.

Most of these sollutions are based on iDirect technology, which means you get crisp and snappy response times. Not the same as Sentech's VSAT which is based on older technology.

Now you might say whoa this sound very expensive especially the equipment!

For 128k diginet connection with telkom you pay more or less R11 000 per month and
for 512k diginet connection you pay more or less R46 000 per month. Thats a ripoff!

And then you still sit with the SAT-3 cable between you and the world.

A few companies can say share equipment and have their own accounts with the solutions provider.

Maybe this is the way to go in the future.

Alot of other african countries use these services.

PJ
 
SAT-3 has plenty of bandwidth to support broadband in SA, it is only a "bottleneck" because Telkom has a strangle hold on access to it. If competition were allowed to access it without having to pay Telkom the situation would be entirely different.
 
iDirect is just the modem equipment. It still works on C band or VSAT. However I dont like satellite solutions because of the latency issue. Sunspots are also a problem, and unless you have a nice big dish so is bad weather.
 
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by asmith</i>
<br />iDirect is just the modem equipment. It still works on C band or VSAT. However I dont like satellite solutions because of the latency issue. Sunspots are also a problem, and unless you have a nice big dish so is bad weather.
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

iDirect - This is the first system that was designed from the ground up
to support IP in a WAN environment. The real differentiator is that it use
router technology, rather than modem technology.

VSAT terminals are based on modem
technology. They don't have the concept of router queues, so the only way
they know to ask for more bandwidth is when they've already started to drop
packets on the floor because their buffers have overflowed. This is highly
inefficient. The iDirect solution uses router technology, and let's face it,
when you think of IP and the Internet, you think of Cisco routers. You have
to have router technology to offer good service for IP in a WAN environment.
 
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Perdition</i>
<br />SAT-3 has plenty of bandwidth to support broadband in SA, it is only a "bottleneck" because Telkom has a strangle hold on access to it. If competition were allowed to access it without having to pay Telkom the situation would be entirely different.

<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Telkom has invested 13% ($85m) of the total costs but has access to almost 21% of the total capacity. I don't think they will get more access. Maybe that is why sthey have a strangle on it.
 
pjvandyk said
"(If you use Sentech VSAT your internet service will be connected in Johannesburg, so maybe this is great for local bandwidth and you still have bad international bandwidth)"
No, local and international suck on Vstar, even to Internet Solution where Sentech gets it's bandwidth.
 
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