Most telecoms experts that were contacted said that it is highly unlikely that the capacity on the system is fully utilized. Telkom confirmed this in an official response.
Finally the beast admitting to something. Question is what are they going to do about it. Some calculations to follow...
The Minister’s comments are thought to be part of her drive to promote the construction of a new submarine telecommunications cable system on the West coast of Africa.
While detailed information about this intended cable system is not yet available, it is closely linked to the needs of the projected square kilometer array telescope for which South Africa is bidding.
As clear a conflict of interest here as I have ever seen.
Let's do some calculations shall we...
Consider that we have about 200,000 broadband users in the country which is slowly but steadily growing. Consider that about 100,000 of them are adsl users. Yes, I know it is slightly more but our calculations should show it to be inconsequential.
100,000 users
3GB average allowed per month
30 days average per month
100,000 x 3 ÷ 30 ÷ (24x60x60) = 948.148Mb/s
Hang on! Surely that can't be right, let's take it step by step...
100,000 x 3GB = 300,000GB per month
300,000GB ÷ 30 days = 10,000GB per day
10,000GB ÷ (24x60x60) = 10,000GB ÷ 86,400 = 0.11574GB = 118.5185MB = 948.148Mb/s
Surely we must have made a mistake somewhere. Oh yes that's right, what about the dial-up users? Lets take them at 200,000 also and consider that they can download ten times the amount as on adsl. And the number of none Telkom customers? Take them at 100,000. And the few uncapped accounts? The none telkom customers using satellite bandwidth should make up for that bandwidth.
So, it's our original 100,000 + another 100,000 + 200,000 x 10 (the dial-up users). That's 2,200,000 or 22 x 948.148 = 20.37Gb/s. Also most bandwidth is used during business hours so they could be running at nearly 40Gb/s and bandwidth is scarce? With the calculation Telkom uses it indeed is. Reality can not be further from the truth. By far the greatest majority of the dial-up users are not very smart in managing their connection and only uses it to dial in and download their email/do a bit of browsing and hang up again without using nearly as much as adsl users. The 3GB Telkom account includes local bandwidth with people regularly using more being blacklisted. Most of the other accounts only have an additional local cap after the initial cap is reached which also counts towards local and international usage. So cut the 2,000,000 from the dial-up users in 10 and halve the broadband users which brings us back to 100,000+200,000. That only equals 3 x 948.148MB/s or <3GB/s.
Bwana: It is possible that Telkom invested the most, but that does not mean it owns the largest share. These things are rarely equal and is set by bids most of the time. Telkom must have thought that whatever share it has was worth paying $85million for. I think that VSNL owns the largest share of the cable itself as it is one of the main initiators of the project and such a large company. The thing is they likely paid less than Telkom for a larger share. What happens is that a group of potential investors meets with the coordinators of the project. They then offer up a share of say 10% and the investors bid on this. They then end up with one investor or a few investors owning that 10% together. Depending on how many investors there are, how much they are willing to spend, and how large a share is left it is even possible that someone might pay less for a 20% share later on than for a 10% share earlier on. But because the shareholders agreement is confidential we really don't know who owns what, how much they paid for it unless they disclose it, or even how the price was set and everything we know is just speculation really. The secrecy was agreed to by the shareholders/owners/coordinators and not the government.
With Telkom having exclusive right to the landing station however I really don't think Verizon or even Neotel could know exactly how much bandwidth is being sent over the SAT-3 cable by Telkom unless they have the right to install monitoring equipment at the landing station.
