MWEB refuses to pay for IP transit anymore

My feeling is the other ISP's will fall in line as their international links will be flooded with MWEB traffic should they not peer. The sheer volume MWEB moves will work like a sledgehammer to get them in line.
 
Just received this from hetzner who host my website:

Dear Hetzner Customer,

MWeb recently announced that they will no longer pay other local internet service providers (ISPs) e.g. Telkom for local transit bandwidth. From Thursday, 28 October all traffic between MWeb and other local ISPs that do not peer* with MWeb directly will be routed internationally.


How does this affect you?

From Thursday, if you access the Internet via MWeb you may experience slower connectivity when accessing your website hosted on Hetzner's South African network (this does not apply to our network in Germany). It may also take longer for you to send and receive email.
This issue will also affect any visitors to your website hosted in South Africa that make use of MWeb as their ISP.

Any MWeb subscriber accessing local content on any ISP network that does not currently have a peering relationship with MWeb will experience the same issues.

Unfortunately this is out of our control and not something we are able to assist customers with. We have prepared questions below that should address your concerns. If you feel it necessary to contact Hetzner, please understand that we may be experiencing high call and ticket volumes.

*Peering refers to the interconnection of administratively separate Internet networks for the purpose of exchanging traffic between the customers of each network.
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Now I host with hetzner locally to receive files and hopefully let the website visitors who are mainly from SA have a decent download speed. The way I read this is my customers who use MWEB are going to have a terrible experience. I already had a customer having to bring in a 60MB file instead of using our file tranfer, he is with MWEB. So this is happening, I know Hetzner's hands are tied as that is controlled by MTN.

So now which local hosts can you use which won't be affected by this. Please don't say MWEB.
 
I must say, every time I read a reply by Andrew, my ears tingle - worthy person to listen to, and some excellent points there sir !
Dear MWEB - now that you have sorted out the latency issue for me, care to comment on pushing Telkom to do IPC / DSLAM upgrades ?
I am sure you can make this happen ?? :P
 
Ianf1 said:
Just received this from hetzner who host my website:
.....

Now I host with hetzner locally to receive files and hopefully let the website visitors who are mainly from SA have a decent download speed. The way I read this is my customers who use MWEB are going to have a terrible experience. I already had a customer having to bring in a 60MB file instead of using our file tranfer, he is with MWEB. So this is happening, I know Hetzner's hands are tied as that is controlled by MTN.

So now which local hosts can you use which won't be affected by this. Please don't say MWEB.
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Woohooo... interesting times ahead. Things are hotting up. MWEB are really gonna stir up a major storm.

Hetzner's South African servers are sitting with MTN NS / Ex-Verizon I believe. If MTN refuse to peer with MWEB on open terms, then MyBB, the country's largest technology and news site, is gonna end up being really slow for users on MWEB, the countries largest ADSL ISP.

This notice from Hetzner hints that MTN NS will be severing its peering links with MWEB. Why am I not surprised?

Will MyBB then switch hosting to a provider who does (or who's upstream provider does) peer with MWEB (on open terms, but this is implied) ?

Exciting times ahead. Thanks to MWEB! Watch this space.
 
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Interesting stuff... very interesting. No matter their abysmal service levels at present, you have to give Mweb props for their cahones.

Possible stuff that'd be even more interesting:

1) This affects news24/Naspers stuff
2) Mweb as an ISP looks at the figures and decides to totally unshape all of their customers (bit more pressure)

Hopefully MWEB wins this one.
 
Ianf1 said:
Just received this from hetzner who host my website:
Unfortunately this is out of our control and not something we are able to assist customers with.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

BS. I'd reply to this email "asking" them to do something about it - as in, they need to exert pressure on their providers to sort it out. That is the only way that these ISPs will crack. They need to feel the pressure from all sides...
 
Tommygun said:
This is much more of a content war than a capacity war.
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That is MWEB's longer-term vision that most SAns don't realise yet ... the creation of a "proper" local broadband infrastructure takes the market to the next level, content-provision. This is 'done and boring' in most other countries but it will be a new concept in SA. That's why local peering is so important to MWEB; it's an important ingredient in realising this. Once we can take the network for granted, then one can start asking "OK what do we do with it", but right now it's still about creating a decent network. All the other players are still in the mindset of selling Internet as something overpriced to do "email and surfing" with, that is so 2002.
 
iCubed.Saajid said:
This notice from Hetzner hints that MTN NS will be severing its peering links with MWEB.
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The peering has never been there due to MTN Bus/Verizon/UUNet's historical reluctance to peer with certain networks (e.g. MWEB).

This means these networks pay SAIX exhorbitant transit fees to achieve connectivtiy between them and MTN Bus. Whats more they were/are footing the bill for the pleasure of having MTN's customers access their networks at high speed.

In the case of MWEB-MTN, the sad fact is both are connected to JINX & CINX on common Gigabit+ switches. All it takes is a 5min software config to have the traffic flowing at high speed with minimal latency.
 
Hey Guys.

Have there been any peering updates of late? I think the last I heard was that VodaCom were entering into a Peering agreement with Mweb. I assume Telkom is still not coming to the party?

Thanks
 
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