Seacom Connectivity

This isn't an "Africa" problem. This isn't a local ISP problem. This is due to the nature of Global communications. Most of Asia was shut down by a damaged cable a couple years ago. Yes, countries that are technically leading edge (Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong) were cut off from the world. Corporate clients that pay the big bucks for guaranteed connectivity contracts were re-routed through Europe and Satellite within 24 hours or so. Normal users had almost zero connectivity to much of the world for a few days and significantly reduced speed for about a month. If this can happen in Asia...

Redundancy? It is impossible financially to have spare capability sitting around and not being used. Even it was possible, from an end-user point of view, imagine if SA had double the bandwidth but reserved 50% for redundancy. Just sitting there but not being used, waiting for a problem. We'd be crying for the extra bandwidth to be put into use providing extra speed. No longer is it redundancy if it is used, and we're back in the same boat when a failure occurs.

There is plenty to complain about with internet access in SA, but this outage is not the fault of ISP's here.

http://www.zdnetasia.com/earthquake-knocks-out-asian-communications-61977997.htm
 
Leafs1967 said:
This isn't an "Africa" problem. This isn't a local ISP problem. This is due to the nature of Global communications. Most of Asia was shut down by a damaged cable a couple years ago. Yes, countries that are technically leading edge (Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong) were cut off from the world. Corporate clients that pay the big bucks for guaranteed connectivity contracts were re-routed through Europe and Satellite within 24 hours or so. Normal users had almost zero connectivity to much of the world for a few days and significantly reduced speed for about a month. If this can happen in Asia...

Redundancy? It is impossible financially to have spare capability sitting around and not being used. Even it was possible, from an end-user point of view, imagine if SA had double the bandwidth but reserved 50% for redundancy. Just sitting there but not being used, waiting for a problem. We'd be crying for the extra bandwidth to be put into use providing extra speed. No longer is it redundancy if it is used, and we're back in the same boat when a failure occurs.

There is plenty to complain about with internet access in SA, but this outage is not the fault of ISP's here.

http://www.zdnetasia.com/earthquake-knocks-out-asian-communications-61977997.htm
Click to expand...

+1
 
Leafs1967 said:
This isn't an "Africa" problem. This isn't a local ISP problem. This is due to the nature of Global communications. Most of Asia was shut down by a damaged cable a couple years ago. Yes, countries that are technically leading edge (Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong) were cut off from the world. Corporate clients that pay the big bucks for guaranteed connectivity contracts were re-routed through Europe and Satellite within 24 hours or so. Normal users had almost zero connectivity to much of the world for a few days and significantly reduced speed for about a month. If this can happen in Asia...

Redundancy? It is impossible financially to have spare capability sitting around and not being used. Even it was possible, from an end-user point of view, imagine if SA had double the bandwidth but reserved 50% for redundancy. Just sitting there but not being used, waiting for a problem. We'd be crying for the extra bandwidth to be put into use providing extra speed. No longer is it redundancy if it is used, and we're back in the same boat when a failure occurs.

There is plenty to complain about with internet access in SA, but this outage is not the fault of ISP's here.

http://www.zdnetasia.com/earthquake-knocks-out-asian-communications-61977997.htm
Click to expand...

There's no denying that redundancy is expensive. But saying that it is financially impossible is an over statement. For instance, an ISP can buy bandwidth from 3 sea cable resellers.
They can then put their Business users on one, Soho users on one and home users on the other. If any one cable system get disrupted those users can be distributed across the remaining two.
Sure it will have an impact speed but the important factor is that everyone is still connected. ;)
 
P0is3nIvy said:
There's no denying that redundancy is expensive. But saying that it is financially impossible is an over statement. For instance, an ISP can buy bandwidth from 3 sea cable resellers.
They can then put their Business users on one, Soho users on one and home users on the other. If any one cable system get disrupted those users can be distributed across the remaining two.
Sure it will have an impact speed but the important factor is that everyone is still connected. ;)
Click to expand...

I can't believe all our ISP's have not consulted you about international broadband provisioning. Clearly they're out of the loop. No wonder we're suffering now that Seacom is down. I'm with MWeb, so I hope they just read your post too and contact you for more helpful, free advice on how to provide affordable, reliable broadband to the country, even when a major link like Seacom is down. Your solution let's us stay connected, but at a slower speed? That's good, because at the moment, with Seacom down, we seem to be connected, but at a slower speed. Oh, wait, what ...
 
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SabreWolfy said:
I can't believe all our ISP's have not consulted you about international broadband provisioning. Clearly they're out of the loop. No wonder we're suffering now that Seacom is down. I'm with MWeb, so I hope they just read your post too and contact you for more helpful, free advice on how to provide affordable, reliable broadband to the country, even when a major link like Seacom is down. Your solution let's us stay connected, but at a slower speed? That's good, because at the moment, with Seacom down, we seem to be connected, but at a slower speed. Oh, wait, what ...
Click to expand...

Hey, I aim to please man. ;)
 
Leafs1967 said:
This isn't an "Africa" problem. This isn't a local ISP problem. This is due to the nature of Global communications. Most of Asia was shut down by a damaged cable a couple years ago. Yes, countries that are technically leading edge (Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong) were cut off from the world. Corporate clients that pay the big bucks for guaranteed connectivity contracts were re-routed through Europe and Satellite within 24 hours or so. Normal users had almost zero connectivity to much of the world for a few days and significantly reduced speed for about a month. If this can happen in Asia...

Redundancy? It is impossible financially to have spare capability sitting around and not being used. Even it was possible, from an end-user point of view, imagine if SA had double the bandwidth but reserved 50% for redundancy. Just sitting there but not being used, waiting for a problem. We'd be crying for the extra bandwidth to be put into use providing extra speed. No longer is it redundancy if it is used, and we're back in the same boat when a failure occurs.

There is plenty to complain about with internet access in SA, but this outage is not the fault of ISP's here.

http://www.zdnetasia.com/earthquake-knocks-out-asian-communications-61977997.htm
Click to expand...

+1

Just as a side note I think it was the eaxact same cable back then that caused the problems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_submarine_cable_disruption

Asia actually has a bigger issue/risk here, there is one single location where the majority of cables run through somewhere in asia, if the proverbial paw-paw strikes the fan there they are fooked!
 
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P0is3nIvy said:
There's no denying that redundancy is expensive. But saying that it is financially impossible is an over statement. For instance, an ISP can buy bandwidth from 3 sea cable resellers.
They can then put their Business users on one, Soho users on one and home users on the other. If any one cable system get disrupted those users can be distributed across the remaining two.
Sure it will have an impact speed but the important factor is that everyone is still connected. ;)
Click to expand...

Yes they could. And do. You just need to purchase the correct package. Just be prepared to pay way over R300 an month
 
bekdik said:
Yes they could. And do. You just need to purchase the correct package. Just be prepared to pay way over R300 an month
Click to expand...

Ok and what if you DO pay over R300 per month for the Uncapped Express+ product that Axxess resells. Until Friday the product was supposed to be using the SAT3/SAFE cable which technically is more resilient in terms of cable breaks, however IS switched the product to the SEACOM cable without notification by Axxess or IS. And yes I realise that Axxess should be the company doing the notification, not IS. Axxess only updated their website product details on Friday when I queried the loss of connectivity.

As for this whole debate, fan bois will always side with their favourite. At the end of the day we as the consumer need to demand more transparency from the service providers so informed decisions can be made. I want to know what networks my traffic transits; I want to know my service provider knows how to communicate with me; I want to know how over-subscribed the bandwidth pool is; I want to know who has access to my data; I want to know the contention ratios.

Am I alone in wanting to know this about a service I'm paying premium cash for? And no I'm not talking about these cheap uncapped gimmick products.
 
EricsON said:
Ok and what if you DO pay over R300 per month for the Uncapped Express+ product that Axxess resells. Until Friday the product was supposed to be using the SAT3/SAFE cable which technically is more resilient in terms of cable breaks, however IS switched the product to the SEACOM cable without notification by Axxess or IS. And yes I realise that Axxess should be the company doing the notification, not IS. Axxess only updated their website product details on Friday when I queried the loss of connectivity.

As for this whole debate, fan bois will always side with their favourite. At the end of the day we as the consumer need to demand more transparency from the service providers so informed decisions can be made. I want to know what networks my traffic transits; I want to know my service provider knows how to communicate with me; I want to know how over-subscribed the bandwidth pool is; I want to know who has access to my data; I want to know the contention ratios.

Am I alone in wanting to know this about a service I'm paying premium cash for? And no I'm not talking about these cheap uncapped gimmick products.
Click to expand...

Yesyou can get al of that. Just phone your ISP and order a product withguaranteed up time.
 
Look, complain as much as you like, you agreed to the terms and conditions when you signed up. You don't like it tough takkie. Redundancy is an expensive operation and if you'd rather cover your bases then you should spend more money. However, those Express subscribers should be pissed.
 
Wow people get over yourselves. You aren't paying that much and you aren't special. Come back if you are paying 50k a month for a service that absolutely guarantees absolutely no downtime or reduced quality. There is currently a issue with a number of major undersea cables, and the whole world's fibre providers are doing what they can to route their customers as best they can. The only thing that leaves south africa is the dark ages still is the poor capacity of our local terrestrial networks. Internationally we are doing about as well as anyone else. We have more undersea providers on the way, and things are just getting better and better. There is nothing wrong with the seacom cable networks right now, and they are doing all in their power to ensure their customers retain aceptable levels of connectivity. Out problem lies Seacom's provider in the med, SEA ME WE 4, which experienced some damage to their cable, probably as a result of a fishing trawler. Other providers in the med have issues at the moment as well, which is why this has become a noticeable problem.
 
EricsON said:
Ok and what if you DO pay over R300 per month for the Uncapped Express+ product that Axxess resells. Until Friday the product was supposed to be using the SAT3/SAFE cable which technically is more resilient in terms of cable breaks, however IS switched the product to the SEACOM cable without notification by Axxess or IS. And yes I realise that Axxess should be the company doing the notification, not IS. Axxess only updated their website product details on Friday when I queried the loss of connectivity.

As for this whole debate, fan bois will always side with their favourite. At the end of the day we as the consumer need to demand more transparency from the service providers so informed decisions can be made. I want to know what networks my traffic transits; I want to know my service provider knows how to communicate with me; I want to know how over-subscribed the bandwidth pool is; I want to know who has access to my data; I want to know the contention ratios.

Am I alone in wanting to know this about a service I'm paying premium cash for? And no I'm not talking about these cheap uncapped gimmick products.
Click to expand...

Have the same problem as you, paying business adsl that was bought before seacom was out was running on siax,and they switched me over also without letting me know.
Using mweb business adsl
 
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