Help needed: math model of Telkom ADSL

A

Alkine

Senior Member
Joined
Jan 22, 2005
Messages
665
Reaction score
1
I would like to build a mathematical model of how much money telkom are receiving from us (the user base grows exponentially). A few things I need to do this is:
1. The month and year ADSL was released
2. The price changes and package changes to date (when were they released / changed and what was the costs at that time).
3. Also I need the ADSL user base info, as much as I can get so I can plot an accurate graph (eg. there are 100 000 ADSL users Aug 2005).

If you can give information to the day it will help but its not necessary.

With this I can build a nice model in matlab and work out how much money telkom took from us to date. The plan is to see what the results of this model is and then to work from there.

Help on this will be greatly appreciated
Thanks!
----
eek posted in wrong category soz! plz move :o
 
Last edited:
Ok, you need to start of with costs.

A DSlam, which is the unit all ADSL users conect to costs around USD$ 55 per port. so if you work that out after an inital cost of lets say R 400 telkom has paid of the quipment to run 1 persons adsl. now you have to work out the cost of getting bandwidth to each dslam, work on around R 200 per 64k of 24/7 bandwidth maintianed.
 
Umm. Can you explain about the R200 per each 64k of 24/7 bandwidth supplied? Does this mean it costs them R200 a month for this? If so they are making a massive loss on each person?? Because if they need enough bandwidth to guarentee 512k for each connection they are going to have to pay over R1000 a month just for the bandwidth?? :confused:
 
Contention ratio

I would suggest using a 50:1 contention ratio as that would be a conservative number because the lower the contention, the more expensive it is to provide the service. A 20:1 contention ratio would cost them more, but I seriously doubt that it is what we're getting. I would expect it to be anything between 50:1 and 100:1.
 
DSLAM port costs

Also, I've seen some reports (maybe 12 to 18 months old) that talks of $70 - $100 per port. Maybe per port costs have fallen to $55 as stated by now? Again I would use the higher conservative number to give Telkom the benefit of the doubt.
 
Hehe, firstly thanks for you inputs, but we can only speculate how much adsl is costing telkom. What I want to do is model how much money they recieve from their adsl costomers. Its easy to work out how much they get with insallations because you only install adsl once, so it will be (total users * price for install). The hard part is the continual non-linear growth of the user base each month, and thats what im interested in for now.

After we have that, we can work on how much its costing them, and then we can calculate how much they are makeing out of this. So this is the first step in the 3 step plan :)
 
Alkine said:
Hehe, firstly thanks for you inputs, but we can only speculate how much adsl is costing telkom. What I want to do is model how much money they recieve from their adsl costomers. Its easy to work out how much they get with insallations because you only install adsl once, so it will be (total users * price for install). The hard part is the continual non-linear growth of the user base each month, and thats what im interested in for now.

After we have that, we can work on how much its costing them, and then we can calculate how much they are makeing out of this. So this is the first step in the 3 step plan :)
Click to expand...

I think most of the info might be in here, but I have a hard time reading it: http://www.telkom.co.za/pls/portal/docs/page/contents/minisites/ir/docs/FINAL-TKG-BOOKLET-2004.pdf
 
mystic said:
I would suggest using a 50:1 contention ratio as that would be a conservative number because the lower the contention, the more expensive it is to provide the service. A 20:1 contention ratio would cost them more, but I seriously doubt that it is what we're getting. I would expect it to be anything between 50:1 and 100:1.
Click to expand...

I don't understand how contention ratios, relate to cost.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is:
It costs Telkom the same amount of money to maintain a connection with a 1:1 contention ratio than a connection with a 20:1 contention ratio, the only difference is that Telkom make more money from a 20:1 ratio than a 1:1 ratio since the same line has 20 users contending for that line instead of only 1 user.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for the document, I found
Adsl subscribers:
March 31 2003 -> 2,669
Year end -> 20,313

But im not sure if this is the financial year end or the physical year end (dec)
 
LaRoosTa, They will make more money from the 1:20 than the 1:1, because they have 20 people to pay for 1 line as opposed to 1 person paying for the whole line. < ah edit it while im typing will you! :D >

But again we can only speculate on this...
 
Alkine said:
Thanks for the document, I found
Adsl subscribers:
March 31 2003 -> 2,669
Year end -> 20,313

But im not sure if this is the financial year end or the physical year end (dec)
Click to expand...

I believe all the data is for financial year March 31 2003 to March 31 2004.

Here's the info on contention ratios from BT:

To provide a cost effective sevice - all ADSL services are 'contended' (shared) at the following ratios:
50:1
ADSL 500, 1000 & 2000 Solo

20:1
ADSL 500, 1000 & 2000 Business

This contention is applied within the BT network - both locally with other users on your telephone exchange and within the BT network as it connects into our network.

What this means in the 'worst case' is that you could be sharing a 500 Kbit/s connection with up to 49 other users. So if they were all using it at the same time 'theoretically' you would only get 10 Kbit/s (not very fast at all - in fact quite a bit slower than a normal modem).

However, 'in reality' this scenario is very unlikely to happen and you should usually find it to be far faster than a modem connection.

ADSL relies on individual users not making unreasonable traffic demands on the network to provide fast access speeds for all - please see here for further details.

Remember if you are not getting the speed you expect it can be due to the contention ratio but also to many other factors including the capacity of the remote site you are accessing, the quality and length of your telephone line from the local BT exchange - see here for more details.
 
Alkine said:
LaRoosTa, They will make more money from the 1:20 than the 1:1, because they have 20 people to pay for 1 line as opposed to 1 person paying for the whole line. < ah edit it while im typing will you! :D >

But again we can only speculate on this...
Click to expand...

It's mostly in the backbone. For every 20mbps of DSL lines (say, 40 512k customers) they'll have 1mbps of backbone fiber capacity at the DSLAM. So not everyone can run full speed at once, they're counting on people idling and sleeping. It's probably around 50:1 or more knowing Telkom. If we knew the contention ratio we could estimate their backbone fiber capacity based on their # of subscribers, and then calculate the cost of that infrastructure.
 
Wait, im sorry for this dumb question, according to my isp i have a 10:1 ratio, what does that mean, up/dl rates or something?
 
Ye, sorry for the edit.

My point is: The maintenance cost for a 1:1 line and a 20:1 line is the same.

If you took 1 line and only 1 person would use that line, Telkom's maintenance cost would still be the same when you take that same line and share it among 20 people. The only difference is, is that a 1:1 ratio will cost the consumer much more than if you share that line/cost among 20 people.
 
Last edited:
so basically you mean the lower the ratio- higher speed but more cost.
ahhhhhh.
thanks for you help.
but howcome 100:1 users get about 50-55kbs with a 512k connection?
explain?
 
Because everyone is not useing their ADSL at the same time, and im almost sure that the line ***:1 is a bigger pipe than the other 50 or 100 people connected to it.

But this is a bit off topic on the thread...
 
Remeber, bandwidth, has two sides to it, the international portion and the local portion.

EG:

DSLAM ---- > SAIX

They have to connect all the dslams together, so they need to run local loop cables to each one, with the cost of routers, etc as well as maintance on coper eg, there cost is around R 200 per 64k of bandwidth to each dslam, but remeber the only have to run 1:50 of the bandwidth the sell on the DSLAM as the is an over subcribed service.

Based on the following model,

Lets asume Telkom has 90 000 ADSL users, half are 512k and half are 192k

45 000 x line rental (R 599) = R 26 955 000

And

45 000 x line rental (R 229) = R 10 305 000

ok thats is R 37 260 000 per month

Lets asumes that everyoen has to buy an account. which they do at R 150 Telkoms cost

90 000 x account (R 150) = R 13 500 000

Lets add that all together and we get = R 50 760 000

Thats big money and thats per MONTH no wonder they are unhappy with ICASA !

.
 
This is a bit off-topic: Just to clear something up with some proof: http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php?t=24717

It is possible that 50 ADSL users could be sharing a 10mb/s pipe.

The pipe connecting your exchange to Telkom could be 10mb/s which means that there could be 50 512kb/s ADSL connection contending for that 10mb/s pipe. This means theoretically that there could be 20 users downloading full blast without a slowdown.
 
So telkom are money making frauds.
If you pay for a 512kb connection, you /have to get THAT connection.
otherwise its cheating, but were talking about telkom here.
I say we should have a protest.
Off the topic here- ONe good thing for bin-laden, He should have crashed into the telkom head office instead of the towers:D
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X