Broadband saturation unlikely

Even adding the capacity of the New Dawn satellite that Andile Ngcaba, chairman of Convergence Partners has been dreaming about, we will not reach that point in the next five or even ten years.
Andile has been talking about an African satellite ever since he became the director general of the department of communication in the nineties

Let's hope the New Dawn African sattelite doesn't go the same way as NigComSat, which should have been dubbed the 'New Dusk'.:D


Nigeria: Satellite Begins Fall to Earth

15 November 2008
Lagos — Nigeria's multi-billion naira communications satellite is spinning out of control just 18 months after its launch and has commenced its descent to earth, the Voice of America reported last night.

The Chinese built Nigerian Communication Satellite 1 (NigComSat) which was built at the cost of N40 billion, was expected to provide broadband Internet and communications services for government agencies and the private sector.
Click to expand...
http://allafrica.com/stories/200811150117.html
 
It will take years (like 50 or 100) for saturation to happen. we just don't have the economy to support a big market.
 
I don’t subscribe to the notion that broadband will become a whole lot cheaper in the short term. Yes there will be a marginal reduction but not at the level every one is talking about. My reasoning is that while we are landing all this capacity, it still has to be connected with the rest of the country. Neotel is busy increasing its capacity between the main centres. Telkom is upgrading it fibre network and there is Infracom but it seems to concentrate on the educational network.
Click to expand...

Thank you Altech for forcing the markets open. Yes, if it were up to telscum leasing a line from the Seacom landing station to Cape Town or Johannesburg would cost R8,472 Billion per nanosecond.

Thankfully it is not up to these <insert>most vile words ever</insert> :sick::sick::sick:

I hate telscum so much... :rolleyes:
 
Hans vd Groenendaal... it must really suck to be you to believe that babble you're obligated to spout for that company! - I'm sure you're feeling right at home working for Telkom, because you get paid a decent salary, as long as you talk the Telkom talk, so that Telkom can continue to squeeze its customers for every hard working cent just to get "Way Below Average" Internet from that place you earn your salary!

Personally, I would be quite embarrassed to be associated with the company you work for!

Nobody is asking for Free Internet, We're asking for Affordable internet on par with speed, cost & cap size or uncapped, with Fantastic customer care on par with other countries!
 
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Nigeria: Satellite Begins Fall to Earth

15 November 2008
Lagos — Nigeria's multi-billion naira communications satellite is spinning out of control just 18 months after its launch and has commenced its descent to earth, the Voice of America reported last night.

The Chinese built Nigerian Communication Satellite 1 (NigComSat) which was built at the cost of N40 billion, was expected to provide broadband Internet and communications services for government agencies and the private sector.

If it had been a collab between Nigeria and Ghana, it would've been called NigGhaSat!

Couldn't resist :D
 
What the hell did the Nigerians do? How can a satellite go out of orbit in a mere 18 months. They are Mickey Mouse in the true sense of the word.
 
Heh First of all, I don't think Hans's comments about broadband saturation are all that wrong, though I believe the thing thats going to stop us hitting that point has nothing to do with the amount of international bandwidth available OR the consumer demand, its got to do with the insane prices charged for backhaul by the incumbent telcos. It will be *YEARS* before the likes of Altech can get a fully functional high speed network off the ground to carry high speed traffic to the end user, and the investment required to build such a network is immense, which means that they are going to have to recover the cost and it will be passed onto the consumer. The likes of Vodacom, MTN and Telkom who HAVE networks and have been recovering the costs for years have shown no willingness to play nicely in the price game. Neotel who had the option to come in SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than Telkom instead opted to decrease their prices slightly below Telkoms level, but no where near the level they could.

It's also impossible to predict the actual demand from South African consumers, we have one of the highest rates of mobile penetration in the world (mobile to fixed line, the number of google searches being done from mobile devices outta .za is *FAR* higher than those being done from fixed line connectivity according to Stafford Meisie at Google). This fact is yet another limiting factor on the amount of bandwidth that can be eaten up out of the country, because currently mobile technologies simply arent going to give you the same high speeds you will get over 24mbit DSL (which Telkom hasnt rolled out yet, wonder if they ever will), fiber to the home (we can only dream of this), cable (wait, no such thing in South Africa) etc. WiMAX might help, but again, very expensive technology and how much are we going to be screwed for using it? Its an age old game that Telkom has been playing and unfortunatly others have bought into it, inflate the price to keep the demand low, instead of increase the bandwidth, decrease the price and push up the demand (which would actually be more profitable according to many studies).

I wonder, with youtube starting to push videos in HD (and youtube takes up significant percentage points of .za bandwidth according to stats I've drawn from various places), and with other such initiatives, will it eat all the available bandwidth or will we simply be unable to access it because our local backhaul is to slow?

At Capacity Africa recently I posed a simple question to a panel made up of Seacom, EASSY and some others, which I never really got an answer to. The question was this: Will the international price decreases due to Seacom, EASSY and WACS result in the lowering of prices for national backhaul and local loop, or will these cables be priced for fractional utilization based on the fact that we will never fill them because of the insane local pricing. We'll wait and see what happens I guess.
 
Pilgrim said:
Thank you Altech for forcing the markets open. Yes, if it were up to telscum leasing a line from the Seacom landing station to Cape Town or Johannesburg would cost R8,472 Billion per nanosecond.

Thankfully it is not up to these <insert>most vile words ever</insert> :sick::sick::sick:

I hate telscum so much... :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

ROFL :D
 
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