Comprehensive comparison of FTTH offerings?

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KillerX

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After seriously looking at all the FTTH offerings over the last week, I have come to realize that they are all very different. I'm still looking at it from my very narrow 'adsl mindset' where Telkom was the only infrastructure provider, and the ISP data portion gave you a little bit of flavor.

For FTTH, the pricing and packages are all quite different. Included data bundles, speeds, price per gig bolt on, included equipment etc, all vary.

Vodacom is offering fibre at my complex, and at first glance their prices appear to be way over the top, along with a 24 month only contract. However, I have no doubt that their backbone infrastructure will be excellent, and I'm not going to have a repeat of Telkom ADSL, with overloaded exchanges and erratic service.

I think we have a pretty good idea that the big boys (Vodacom, MTN and Telkom) will each be using their own backbone.
But what about the smaller players? Syniq, Vumatel, Lightspeed.... Who's backbone infrastructure are they using? What about contention ratios? I have seen anywhere from 10:1 to 50:1. Do any of them shape and throttle connections like so many ADSL ISP's do?

Does anyone have a comprehensive comparison list of the FTTH offerings

Thanks!
 
A comprehensive FTTH sticky is needed on this forum I think. At the very least it might shame Vodacom, MTN and Telkom into offering better value for money.

Vodacom looks like the worst value for money out of all the options. R1799pm for 200GB data on 100Mbps is terrible. Even MTN can offer the same for R1649pm, also including a router. That's a difference of R3600 over two years.

Telkom's prices are a little better, but the 24 month contract requirement makes them all awful options. At least Telkom lets you just pay for the line and get your data elsewhere.
 
Bryn said:
A comprehensive FTTH sticky is needed on this forum I think. At the very least it might shame Vodacom, MTN and Telkom into offering better value for money.

Vodacom looks like the worst value for money out of all the options. R1799pm for 200GB data on 100Mbps is terrible. Even MTN can offer the same for R1649pm, also including a router. That's a difference of R3600 over two years.

Telkom's prices are a little better, but the 24 month contract requirement makes them all awful options. At least Telkom lets you just pay for the line and get your data elsewhere.
Click to expand...

One thing to remember is that each company have a different time over which they plan to get a return on their investments. Two equally good (and costly in terms of investment as well as maintenance) networks may have very different pricing because for operator 1 the ROI is within 3 years while for operator 2 it is within 12 years. Making the assumption than the MTN / Vodacom networks are high quality because they are more expensive is a false assumption, they have very short ROI periods. This is similar to paying for you home loan over 10 years or over 20.

I also doubt that you could publish a few key figures and get a good understanding of what the performance of that network will be. There is a reason engineers design a network, and if you design a poor network you may have a very low contention ratio (even 1:1), but still suffer, while a well designed network with contention ratios of 20:1 may drastically outperform the 1:1 network. Take latency for example. You may get a 10 ms ping on network 1, but every 100th test that ping jumps to 200 ms. Is that better or worse than a 12 ms ping on network 2 that jumps to 200 ms every 1000th test?
 
Alkine said:
There is a reason engineers design a network, and if you design a poor network you may have a very low contention ratio (even 1:1), but still suffer, while a well designed network with contention ratios of 20:1 may drastically outperform the 1:1 network. Take latency for example. You may get a 10 ms ping on network 1, but every 100th test that ping jumps to 200 ms. Is that better or worse than a 12 ms ping on network 2 that jumps to 200 ms every 1000th test?
Click to expand...

All very good points Alkine. Until FTTH users start posting some actual stats we have no idea of what each network's quality is like.

Still, a good idea to at-least have a basic comparison between the claimed network figures such as contention ratio, upload speed and any throttling or shaping measures included in their fair use policy.

Found this tool on Vox's website. Compares quite a few FTTH offerings. After seeing the pricing and data bundles of other providers, Vodacom is definitely WAY overpriced.


https://www.voxtelecom.co.za/ftth
 
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KillerX said:
After seriously looking at all the FTTH offerings over the last week, I have come to realize that they are all very different. I'm still looking at it from my very narrow 'adsl mindset' where Telkom was the only infrastructure provider, and the ISP data portion gave you a little bit of flavor.

For FTTH, the pricing and packages are all quite different. Included data bundles, speeds, price per gig bolt on, included equipment etc, all vary.

Vodacom is offering fibre at my complex, and at first glance their prices appear to be way over the top, along with a 24 month only contract. However, I have no doubt that their backbone infrastructure will be excellent, and I'm not going to have a repeat of Telkom ADSL, with overloaded exchanges and erratic service.

I think we have a pretty good idea that the big boys (Vodacom, MTN and Telkom) will each be using their own backbone.
But what about the smaller players? Syniq, Vumatel, Lightspeed.... Who's backbone infrastructure are they using? What about contention ratios? I have seen anywhere from 10:1 to 50:1. Do any of them shape and throttle connections like so many ADSL ISP's do?

Does anyone have a comprehensive comparison list of the FTTH offerings

Thanks!
Click to expand...
I don't think it's possible to put together a comprehensive list but we can compile all the worthwhile options that come along. Also, nobody uses their own backbone. Even Telkom has to use DFA.
 
I'm starting to think that FTTH is a waste of time and money.

Looks as if I will be sticking to VDSL.

Edit : I've got FTTH on a pole in front of my house, but nobody seems to be installing here. AFAIK it is operational.
 
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