F1ve_Claw
Expert Member
Wonder when the ISP's are going to pick up usage of this cable
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EASSy goes live on Friday
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sunsoffun
Expert Member
More international bandwidth. Checked. Price drop by ISPs. Checked. Last mile opened up.... D A M M I T!
Mercurious
Well-Known Member
Having seen the effect that Seacom has had on ADSL prices, I'm very optimistic about the change to pricing that this cable will bring.
DreamKing
Honorary Master
blaaislaai
Executive Member
We won't benefit from this just yet, took a few months to use SEACOM after its launch
I think a bigger problem is IPC costs from Telkom. No matter how cheap your international bandwidth is, you won't see a significant price drop (or better contention ratios) if IPC pricing remains constant. At some point that becomes more expensive than international bandwidth and the limit on the pricing. Until this drops, there also won't be a huge demand for bandwidth on the cables, beyond what Telkom provisions the ISP's with. Now that the SAT3/SAFE monopoly is broken, the next biggest hurdle in the market is LLU, which sadly, no one from the DoC or ICASA seems to be interested in right now. Either that, or regulating the cost of IPC. Both options will be held up by Telkom as long as they possibly can.
The biggest benefit from this IMO is that ISP's can now use both cables for traffic, adding some redundancy. No idea regarding pricing on the two cables, but if both cost the same I wouldn't be surprised if ISP's buy half their bandwidth needs on each cable and uses both links simultaneously. When WACS lands they will be able to obtain redundancy down the other coast, putting them on the same level as SAT3/SAFE in terms of redundancy.
The biggest benefit from this IMO is that ISP's can now use both cables for traffic, adding some redundancy. No idea regarding pricing on the two cables, but if both cost the same I wouldn't be surprised if ISP's buy half their bandwidth needs on each cable and uses both links simultaneously. When WACS lands they will be able to obtain redundancy down the other coast, putting them on the same level as SAT3/SAFE in terms of redundancy.
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We really need some competition in the last mile. The point is rapidly approaching where ADSL line rental costs (analogue line + adsl line) are higher than ISP bandwidth costs.
Sting
Ghost in the Machine
Correct, and I think we are already beyond that point!
As pointed out earlier in this thread, do not expect significant price cuts just yet - the IPC costs are the limiting factor at the moment. Rather see this as an opportunity for the ISPs to get affordable redundancy. Btw, I saw that EASSy bandwidth is about 30% less than SEACOM on IRUs. This means that SEACOM should actually become the backup link to EASSy. Not something that I would have been able to imagine a year ago ...
Sure - its been planned. However there are limited resources available to deploy these things. We could take earth moving equipment off the freeway improvement projects and have congestion for years longer. We could take technicians off the world cup infrastructure and not be able to get the TV broadcasts to the rest of the world. We could take network engineers off the Seacom restoration work and leave it offline for 3 months instead of 3 weeks.
None of these are really desired
Patience - all in good time.
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Sure - its been planned. However there are only limited resources available to deploy these things. We could take earth moving equipment off the freeway improvement projects and have congestion for years longer. We could take technicians off the world cup infrastructure and not be able to get the TV broadcasts to the rest of the world. We could take network engineers off the Seacom restoration work and leave it offline for 3 months instead of 3 weeks.
None of these are really desired
Not trying to be argumentative, but are you just speculating? I find it hard to believe that there aren't links in place from the landing station to elsewhere inland.
Roman4604
Executive Member
Because the limiting factor is the capability of local distribution infrastructure.
My best guestimate is that Telkom's ADSL access network in its current form is only able to handle ~15Gbps of peak data inflow (goverened by current traffic patterns & georaphical distribution of providers/end-users).
Going forward its going to be cheap & easy to land multiple Tbps of bandwidth locally, but theres currently nowhere for it to go. Hopefully after the SWC Telkom can put some effort & resources in fixing the local fixed-line capacity imbalance, but they seem to be too distracted trying to build Vodacom mark II. This is why LLU is so critical, a point that seems to be going right over our regulator's head.
LazyLion
King of de Jungle
You want them to light it up for?.... what? The pretty lights? The hell of it?
They will light them up when they need them. No point in lighting them up if there is no demand yet.
This is Africa... not California!
