Seacom - I think we've got it all wrong...

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perelson

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I've had a look at the Seacom website - www.seacom.mu - in an effort to find out what Seacom is really about. Seems to me that Seacom connects Africa to India.

"Phase 1 will connect SEACOM's African cable stations directly to India and from India to Europe."

There is a link to Europe, but primary focus is East Africa and Asia.

Seacom network diagram

So the fact that we are having trouble connecting to US based services via Seacom is hardly surprising to me anymore.

What I don't get is why our service providers are moving over to Seacom? Surely it should be a supplementary service, and not a replacement. If we are moved completely over to Seacom, I doubt we will ever have good bandwidth to the US.

Please correct me if I've misunderstood something.
 
zamicro said:
Huh? You are having trouble? Which service do you use that goes via Seacom?
Click to expand...

Axxess via IS - IS is currently implementing Seacom and has been doing so for the past 2/3 weeks. There are plenty of other threads and posts with people that have experienced bad international speeds, esp at night via IS.
 
somewherenotthere said:
And europe isn't connected to USA with some pretty impressive lines?
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I should think so, but we don't know what our link to that service is like. This is also from the Seacom website:

"SEACOM has procured fibre capacity from Marseilles to London as part of the SEACOM network."

What does that mean? There is a lot of publicity about this new, shiny, 1.2TB link. From what I can tell, the link to Africa is what's running at 1.2TB - the rest is less capacity than that, and the link to Europe and US is unknown, undefined.

http://www.seacom.mu/network/overview.html


I'm just trying to get some actual facts here. I'm not saying Seacom isn't a good idea, but from what I can tell, it isn't going to benefit our US traffic.
 
I think people should get infractions for starting Seacom threads.

Lets just pretend Seacom never happened.
(Because it didn't)
 
From an explanation given at a recent conference and visible on their website, the seacom cable runs up the east coast and has a node near the red sea. This node then splits the cable to India and the other up the Suez to the Mediterranean and joins the cables there.

So consider the following, a signal to get to the states via seacom will go up to the Suez, hop onto the Mediterranean cables and then across the Atlantic. Going via SAT3, it goes up the west coast, hops to Europe and then into the states. I don't know what the latency times are like but I would assume that seacom would have slightly higher latency than SAT3 for US. However the capacity of SAT3 is a max of 80Gbps whereas Seacom is significantly greater. So yes latency will probably be slower for US but it has a much bigger pipe and less congestion to draw on.

Also, the gent giving the talk mentioned that Seacom is only one of about five cables activating in the next five years and is not even the largest. There are larger ones that will run up the west coast into the US and when they come online we should then really have something to see in terms of latency as we would then have higher speed links to both Europe and the US. From a pure geographical standing point though, I think latency between us for Europe and USA will always be different with the US probably lagging, even if the differences become non-issues.

*Edit* The gent's name was Arthur Goldstuck, MD at World Wide Worx.
 
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perelson said:
I should think so, but we don't know what our link to that service is like. This is also from the Seacom website:

"SEACOM has procured fibre capacity from Marseilles to London as part of the SEACOM network."

What does that mean? There is a lot of publicity about this new, shiny, 1.2TB link. From what I can tell, the link to Africa is what's running at 1.2TB - the rest is less capacity than that, and the link to Europe and US is unknown, undefined.

http://www.seacom.mu/network/overview.html


I'm just trying to get some actual facts here. I'm not saying Seacom isn't a good idea, but from what I can tell, it isn't going to benefit our US traffic.
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You are joking right? There are dozens of cables between US and Europe.

Seacom does not need to go to US, it goes to London. From there you can use any of the other cables that they peer with.

Sat3 also does not go to US. It also goes to Europe.

http://www.nrc.nl/multimedia/archive/00170/270808ECO_glasvezel_170984a.jpg
 
I dont know for sure if IS is using seacom allready for 3 weeks, but if they are and the prices have not changed, that means they taking the extra savings and keeping quite to get what they can out of everyone, fo as long as they can.

This kind of thing frustrates me when people say things like this.

Why cant we set thier buildings on fire,, i'll bring the petrol,, hunt them down and smash up their cars ands stuff...lol
 
wHiTe*LiGhTnInG said:
Why cant we set thier buildings on fire,, i'll bring the petrol,, hunt them down and smash up their cars ands stuff...lol
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How african. I can't have it so I'll destroy the infrastructure I want. Rather kick the politicians or ICASA's butts.

Sorry Lance, missed your post /o\
 
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Sigh...

It never ceases to amaze me how we turn everything positive into something negative, if IS are tapping into Seacom its for international bandwdith Yes?

Well i think we can all safely say that we wont see prices drop immediately, lets be realistic for once please.

The fact that there is now a big HEAP of bandwidth coming into africa is fantastic, South Africa is not the most important country on the continent either, alot of other players need bandwidth as well.

Just be positive in the fact that things are changing...
 
Just wanted to say that! Unshapped SAIX account works wonders to the US right. So SAIX use SAT3 if I'm not mistaken and SAT3 is connected to Europe! I'm pretty sure that ZA doesn't have a undersea cablr to the US nor Africa as a matter of fact. Correct me if I'm wrong.
 
perelson said:
As I said, I'm certain their bandwidth is fantastic - it's ours I'm concerned with.



Thanks guys for the cable info - the future certainly looks good.
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Nah, we will be fine. Keep in mind you don't have to build a cable to each continent you want to communicate with (but it does help lower the latency).

Seacom have peering agreements with the global cable networks. Our traffic will terminate somewhere in Europe, then climb onto whatever other cable it needs to go to in order to reach the US (Or China, Australia, Russia, Mexico, whereever).

No country can build cables to every other country, but cables are shared. Sure it is not free, but that is part of the cost. The thing is, overseas there are so many cables that prices are driven down. Over here we only had one cable, so costs were kept as high as possible for the benefit of one company. :mad:
 
Stuff price, how about performance ?

We are all used to the monthly spend, just show us it's possible to equal performance available in other countries. I have my doubts Telkom has the ability or inclination to offer the local speed that all our money has paid for. So our connection to the outside becomes irrelevant.
 
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