Seacom versus SAT-3/SAFE latency

I attended an interesting talk at IS re SEACOM. What not everyone realises is that SEACOM has no redundancy from cable breaks. SAT3 can fail over to SAFE. This means that to achieve proper cost reductions without sacrificing redundancy you need to consider a blended solution of SAT3 and SEACOM. The net effect is that you will be looking at roughly a 19% price reduction in the wholesale cost of bandwidth in a blended environment.
 
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Ok.... wait, if you're buying a link on SAT3 for X amount of bandwidth.. do Telkom fail it over to SAFE automatically if it SAT3 dies?...

That would be incredibly generous of Telkom since they're two seperate cables.

Show me ANY undersea cable that has redundancy that doesn't rely on another totally seperate cable.
 
Latency won't be better than SAT3. That's just physics.

ZA to UK will for a long time still be in the region of 150-180ms at best.
 
TheRoDent said:
ZA to UK will for a long time still be in the region of 150-180ms at best.
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:D More or less until the end of time, since it's determined by the speed of light in an optical fibre, which we're not expecting to change.
 
Until Telscum miraculously invent something that can circumvent the normal rules of the universe
 
Actually given the geographic features I reckon you'd probably shave between 1000 and 2000kms off the cable length
 
ToxicBunny said:
Actually given the geographic features I reckon you'd probably shave between 1000 and 2000kms off the cable length
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Its all fun and games until the drillbit hits a large underground aquifer.


Either way, Neohell may have a monopoly on it already. (p.s. on intercrust telecommunications, and not our beloved tube of light) ;)
 
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So, competition kicks in, service improves or prices drop or something happens. In the end, we have more choice. More choice for us means more pressure on SAT-3/SAFE, which in turn might change the landscape there a little too. Thus, people who won't mind the latency so much and people who mind the latency would all benefit in the end.
 
doubt Seacom will be any worse - let's see when it arrives. :)
 
ads said:
:D More or less until the end of time, since it's determined by the speed of light in an optical fibre, which we're not expecting to change.
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Or to put it another way, to travel 1000 kilometres in fiber, the signal will take 5 milliseconds to propagate. Thus a phone call carried by fiber between Sydney and New York, a 12000 kilometre distance, means that there is an absolute minimum delay of 60 milliseconds (or around 1/16th of a second) between when one caller speaks to when the other hears
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Sauce: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_fiber under index of infraction.

So, for the 15 000 km distance, the expected 95ms delay being experienced is kind of on-par.
 
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Interesting, just tried pinging other servers from our U.S. box -

U.S to U.S -> 16 ms ping to google
U.S to S.A -> 308 ms to mybroadband
S.A to S.A -> 97ms to mybroadband
 
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