Sorry mate. Didnt check profile.. no time.
Anyways:
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<b>Sentech article in Brainstorm...draw your own conclusions</b>
Sentech wields disarming candour
By Ivo Vegter
Sentech, the state-owned but commercially-run telecoms operator, has been under a barrage of sustained criticism over real and perceived failures in the last few months. Surprisingly for a long-sheltered, low-profile parastatal, it has come out to face its critics with vigour and candour - and throws in a few lofty promises.
You know you're in trouble when the words "government bail-out" start doing the rounds. Nobody can quite pinpoint the source of talk that a financial lifeline is to be thrown to embattled Sentech, so it remains firmly in the realm of hearsay. We put the question to Sentech's CEO, Sebiletso Mokone-Matabane.
"No," she says, emphatically. "What we have done is enter into a public-private partnership. Our board approved a build-operate-transfer model, whereby private sector companies build the network, we will operate it, and then we have an option to buy it back from them maybe three years on. Government does not put any money into it."
This seems to be a point of pride. When hearing Sentech described as a state-owned company, Wilson Smith, MyWireless product manager, is quick to point out that Sentech is commercially run, without funding from tax coffers.
Mokone-Matabane is unable to provide details of their private sector partners, or how much such a deal will be worth. "The scale depends on demand," she says. "We'd like to build the network where the demand is, with a view to covering a large part of this country within 24 months."
Rumours of financial trouble come as no surprise. Sentech has been under siege as a result of a series of very real problems, from customer displeasure about actual throughput on packages advertised as "broadband", to discoveries of serious network flaws that would allow non-customers to abuse Sentech servers to route their own traffic, and including an embarrassing - and damaging - disclosure of a spreadsheet containing the private details of some 1 700 MyWireless customers.
In addition, the pending entry into the market of several competitors for wireless, high-speed Internet access creates an environment in which it becomes hard to separate truth from malicious rumour.
Mokone-Matabane's unequivocal denial will be confirmed - or disproven - soon enough. The company's annual report was being printed as we spoke, and would be made public after being tabled in parliament as soon as possible after publication at the end of August 2004.
Soft limits
No illusions
"We had no illusions it would be error-free."
Sebiletso Mokone-Matabane, CEO, Sentech
The most frequent complaint heard about Sentech's consumer service, MyWireless, is that it is much slower than the advertised speeds suggest. The solution Sentech offered was to attempt to minimise what its acceptable use policy vaguely terms "excessive utilisation".
Roelf Diedericks, who had been an enthusiastic supporter of MyWireless when it was first launched, but went on to launch a series of complaint websites attacking the service, derides this as blaming the customer for operator error. Another user, who works as a technical engineer at a major ISP, trots out a famous line used against Telkom in the past: "You don't make a network faster by making it slower."
Smith points out, however, that customers need to distinguish between absolute volume of data transfer over a given period of time and the speed of the connection. The intention is to measure average volumes, and then try to manage those users who exceed this by a certain, large amount.
How much would this "soft limit" be, in real terms?
"It's not a hard cap, so these figures are ballpark estimates. But I'd say 10GB on a 128kbps package, 20GB on 256kbps and 40GB on 512kbps," he says.
He adds that the contract, including the "excessive utilisation" clause, was adapted from similar contracts by operators offering broadband products globally. "This concept, albeit possible naïve, was adopted to move away from the hard or static cap used by our competitors."
To date, only "about 20-odd" customers have been contacted, and Smith says while he can't yet report on changes, anecdotal evidence suggests the call centre has not had serious adverse reactions.
Contentious contention
Sebiletso Mokone-Matabane~Wilson Smith
Photo: Sally Shorkend
No hard cap: Wilson Smith provides "soft limits" on different MyWireless packages
MyWireless - like most consumer data services, but unlike corporate products such as VSTAR - is a contended service. With a non-contended service, one user's utilisation does not have an impact on anyone else - provided sufficient bandwidth is available upstream from the operator.
The goal of contention is to provide cheaper products by having several users share the same fixed amount of bandwidth. Contention relies on the fact that average line utilisation for a single user is a fraction of the total capacity of a connection, and that therefore a number of users can more optimally share the cost of a line.
When Sentech first rolled out the offering, the intended contention ratio on any of the three packages was 30, though low numbers of subscribers kept the real ratio down signficantly. But, says Smith, "Today the contention ratio is around 15 to 20. We want to go to four."
If it achieves this, Sentech could guarantee minimum throughput, as users have been demanding. But, he points out, doing so is something that "right now, we cannot".
For a start, he says, the operator would have to improve bandwidth management so that, for example, available bandwidth is distributed equally among users, and not among sessions, as is currently the case.
"It's seemingly simple, but few service providers worldwide - and none in South Africa - offer more than best-effort contracts, instead of a guaranteed minimum. Such a guarantee also affects the cost of provision," he adds.
He says there is another fallacy regarding costs. Of the total cost of offering a MyWireless contract, Smith says about 60 percent is attributable to "Internet costs". This constitutes not only international bandwidth, which is often cited by operators as being expensive (though some dispute the latter assertion). Other costs Sentech incurs include local peering, and local transit traffic which is incurred to reach operators other than the two (Internet Solution and MTN) it connects to at the moment.
Theories and myths
Upping the rate
"Today the contention ratio is around 15 to 20. We want to go to four."
Wilson Smith, product manager, Sentech
Several theories have been advanced to explain the service problems Sentech is experiencing.
One theory, advanced by Diedericks, involves two servers known as "proxy" or "caching" servers, which were inadvertently left misconfigured in such a way that access to them was open to anyone. As a result, Diedericks suggests, people such as ADSL users who had reached their monthly transfer cap, could select these open proxy servers to forward their traffic. The result, of course, is serious degradation of bandwidth available to Sentech's paying customers.
Smith's observation is terse: "It did occur, we acknowledged it, and have ensured that appropriate measures are continuously being taken to prevent such an event from recurring."
Another theory is posited by a source who has detailed technical expertise relevant to wireless broadband networks and claims to have some familiarity with Sentech's network design. This source, who insists on anonymity, says some of the links between base stations and the routers at the core of the network are satellite links that suffer from high latency.
One of the resulting problems of this arrangement is that bandwidth allocation - the software that determines how much a user gets, depending on the package they bought - is at the core of the network, and a delay between a user and this process causes bottlenecks. Also, satellite links themselves tend to come in smaller chunks than terrestrial bandwidth, causing a bottleneck when too many users are connected to the same base station.
The rationale behind such a network design, he explains, is that Sentech is subject to 15-year contracts for satellite bandwidth, and many of its broadcast customers have been switching traffic away from satellite onto terrestrial alternatives. So what was initially a "Band Aid", administered to enable rapid network rollout, has become a permanent solution to optimally use spare satellite capacity.
While it sounds plausible, Smith and Mokone-Matabane unequivocally deny two different predicates in this theory.
Says Smith: "We don't rely on satellite connections. We don't use satellite connectivity in the network apart from the Internet return path for certain traffic [from the UK to South Africa]."
It never rains...
He adds that the base stations are connected aggregation sites and the core network uses high-capacity, line-of-sight, terrestrial connections, such as microwave or high-frequency radio.
Mokone-Matabane dispels the satellite capacity argument too. "We actually need more capacity on satellite. Besides broadcast and voice signals, we have private customers too for satellite connectivity." She cites Gauteng Online, Pick 'n Pay, the HP i-Community, JD Group, Mindscape, and recent signee Ellerines, as examples.
Our unnamed source wasn't impressed. Quoth he: "Yeah right. Unless they changed it in the last two days."
At the time of writing, the company was investigating the damage caused by the disclosure of private customer details, and what recourse it might have against the company that operates its call centre. Besides damaging Sentech's reputation by exposing weak internal controls, handing out customer lists is hardly the right way to face competition from Telkom, and prepare for new entrants to the market.
"I cannot over-emphasise how seriously we take it," says Mokone-Matabane.
Taking all the complaints and admitted issues in total, however, one can only conclude that Sentech has deployed immature technology, lacks facilities, or lacks the skills to offer this kind of service. Surprisingly, the company admits it's a bit of all three.
South Africa is an early adopter of IPWireless, the technology Sentech uses. At the time of deployment, it was only the fourth country in the world to have selected this solution. "We had no illusions it would be error-free," says Mokone-Matabane. "Compare this to when the cellular networks started. This is cutting-edge, and we have technology partners that are eager to iron out any bugs. We're confident there are no fundamental problems with the network or the technology."
To help meet the MyWireless targets Smith has set - guaranteed minimum bandwidth and a contention ratio of four - and to improve redundancy on the network, Sentech has acquired more bandwidth from Internet Solutions, as well as from Telkom, and is in negotiation with other upstream providers. "Since Sentech was designated a public operator, it can buy now from Telkom at wholesale rates," explains Mokone-Matabane.
Smith notes that Sentech is far advanced in making software upgrades to parts of its network that will significantly improve both the theoretical capacity of MyWireless connections and other problems with connecting to base stations.
The company has also applied to the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) for direct access to the SAT3/SAFE undersea cable, and is confident it will get access in due course. "When SAT3 was laid, the markets hadn't been liberalised. We've made a submission that argues that SAT3 is a facility for all players, even though Telkom was the only signatory to the club. Other African countries have the same problem. We think we'll get access."
Learning the hard way
Mokone-Matabane says she does not believe it was necessary to make management changes. "We have confidence in the current leadership. Is Sentech the wrong company to offer a consumer service like this? Depends. If you compare us to Telkom, or City Power... We had service-level agreements in place with customers long before Telkom used them."
As for how the stream of bad news may have benefited broadband wireless competitors waiting in the wings, Mokone-Matabane is neither dismissive nor overly concerned.
"We have not seen [a drop-off in new applications]. The reason may be that our partners have started selling MyWireless, but they would have got the same questions we've been getting.
"But the upshot is that we've learnt a lot about what our customers want, so we can refine our product offering. We'll be launching several new products in the next three to four months, both at corporate and at consumer level. We're also waiting for authorisation from the regulator to do pilot runs of voice services, with the expectation that we'll get a licence to carry voice over IP," she says.
"Competitively, we had a window of opportunity, and though it's narrowed, it's still there. The competition will keep us both honest and busy, so we can only get better. It would be great for South Africa, and at least an accolade should go to Sentech for starting it."
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<font size="1"><center>** still capped at <b>48kbps</b> and who knows for how long **
<font color="green"> proof </font id="green"></center></font id="size1">
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