How much bandwidth do local Universities have?

telkom should have, and should be, doing all of this.

telkom deserves to sink horribly. they have served nobody but their own pockets.
 
What a sad state of affairs. I experienced the snail pace when i was at Wits (1999 to 2001). How pathetic that this has not improved in seven years. I could never do any research on campus. How much longer will this carry on for? Surely, the bright minds at University could be well served by super fast connections, which in turn will serve us by their positive work.

The University of Pretoria has a 5 000 Kbps connection while the University of Johannesburg has a 3 072 Kbps connection. WITS University in Johannesburg has a 5 328 Kbps connection and Rhodes University in Grahamstown has a 3 112 Kbps connection.
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Is this correct? How can it be?
 
Hi Aadil

I have updated the article to show both national and international connectivity. The information that we have does however show local connectivity of only a few Mbps per institution - strange but true.
 
how much bandwidth do they need? get two or more 4m adsl lines and bundle them together or is that too difficult?
 
Does anyone have the current figures for UKZN or are they being typically closed-mouthed about it?
 
According to Steve Song from the International Development Research centre “the average university in Africa has the same aggregate bandwidth as a single home user in North America or Europe.”
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That says it all!
 
Tns said:
how much bandwidth do they need? get two or more 4m adsl lines and bundle them together or is that too difficult?
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This is indeed a solution, but very tough to get past the University authorities.
 
Telcos and the DOC should be ashamed of them-miserable-selves.
 
Telkom will sponsor these stupid bloody soccer events but won't support / sponsor education in SA.

That's the height of pathetic'ness :(
 
I still remember the excitement when Rhodes switched on their 64kbps link to the outside world at the end of 1992, linking the entire Uninet to the internet. We could actually get an ftp login prompt if we were patient...

Looks like not much has changed in 16 years
 
TENET (Tertiary Education Network) provide MRTG graphs relating to the bandwidth limits and consumption of all SA tertiary education insitutions:

http://protea.tenet.ac.za/mrtg-new/graphs.asp

It should be noted that in the article the bandwidth speeds quoted are generally for the main campus of that institution. As an example, the University of Johannesburg has four campuses of which three are connected. The main campus (Kingsway) has an 11,184 Kbps connection of which 8.656 Kbps is International and 3,072 is National.

Doornfontein campus has a 2,848 Kbps connection (2,536 Kbps Int. and 656 Kbps Loc.) and Bunting campus a 2,048 Kbps (1,840 Int. and 128 Kbps Loc.). The combined price of these connections (currently) is in the region of R12 million per annum.

While most of you will be gasping in horror and quickly calculating the cost of a concentrator and ADSL lines just remember that the upload speeds matches the down and that TENET has commissioned international bandwidth and shared international bandwidth at their disposal.

These speeds are for the current GEN2 agreement and should improve with the switch to GEN3.
 
try using the edulink portal of UJ during the day.. takes about 1 minute... if its fast... to load a page.

I tend to go on at like 11 at night now, then its fast.
 
lets see for a million a month.. you can get about 150 uncapped 4 meg lines. Thats atleast 55 MBps download and 5.7 MBps upload

and thats taking it on the negative side...
 
4cer said:
lets see for a million a month.. you can get about 150 uncapped 4 meg lines. Thats atleast 55 MBps download and 5.7 MBps upload

and thats taking it on the negative side...
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And you think Telkom has the capacity for 150 lines? ;)

4cer said:
try using the edulink portal of UJ during the day.. takes about 1 minute... if its fast... to load a page.

I tend to go on at like 11 at night now, then its fast.
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There was a previous article regarding the Akamai installation that has thrown the local bandwidth reserves of the universities into disarray. Historically, local bandwidth was not of high importance as (at the time) most information was located internationally. Local caching has put major strain on the local bandwidth segment which previously was only servicing web traffic to the home sites, local email and minor local browsing.

UJ's Kingsway campus will be attached to the 10GB fibre ring planned for GEN3 which will see a major improvement to local browsing... I hope...
 
Are people not confusing kilobits per second and kilobytes per second here?

Still damn slow though...
 
Stellenbosch

At Stellenbosch we don't have major problems with the speed, I'm estimating an average download speed of about 50KB/s during peak times, up to about 200KB/s offpeak. The latency is good enough for local gaming, even during peak times.

Stellenbosch did get an additional uncapped 4Mbit Telkom ADSL line recently, I'm not sure how successful it is so far.

However, unlike some other universities, we have to pay (per MB) to get these speeds. 30c/MB between 8am and 5pm, 10c/MB between 5pm and 2am, and 1c/MB between 2am and 8am. This means that you have to wait a little to do larger downloads, but at least it is possible. Last year Facebook was basically blocked because of the strain it put on the network, but now we can use it again without problems. With a lot of surfing, online gaming and small downloads, I pay about R60/month for the bandwidth, which is very little compared to the costs of a Telkom ADSL line.

Note that local connectivity (inside the university) is free (R180/year), and most of us have 10 or 100 MBit connections (a few even have gigabit connections now). I upload and download on average about 5GB/day. With these speeds I could download a few hundred GB in a day, but why would I want to do that?.

Does any other university get close to this?
 
xmasbunny said:
There was a previous article regarding the Akamai installation that has thrown the local bandwidth reserves of the universities into disarray. Historically, local bandwidth was not of high importance as (at the time) most information was located internationally. Local caching has put major strain on the local bandwidth segment which previously was only servicing web traffic to the home sites, local email and minor local browsing.

UJ's Kingsway campus will be attached to the 10GB fibre ring planned for GEN3 which will see a major improvement to local browsing... I hope...
Click to expand...

Is this why Local Bandwidth is slower than International Bandwidth?
 
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