so the EASSy cable is live.

[epeer]

i think not.... think about it for a few seconds. providing redundancy on isp level, means they have to buy/rent double the amount of bandwidth they intend to sell. Ie Mweb currently buys x-amount from seacom for ~R1. to provide redundancy, they will need to hire the same amount from Eassy. Double costs for them, which means somebody(like us) will have to foot the bill.

Really? Double?

No, they only need to buy half their requirement from each provider. That way we get some redundancy for free (at degraded - 50% - performance in the case of a single failure). Simple.

Why does everybody have this idea that redundancy costs double? That's crazy.

It's even possible to negotiate a deal for full backup capacity (ie. no degraded performance in the case of failure) and you can do it for far less than double (in the region of a 20-30% premium). You don't need 200% of the bandwidth all of the time. So, you negotiate to pay for additional capacity on an as required basis (for which privilege you'll probably need to pay a small retainer / premium).

 

[mika1000]

Lets wait and see wat Seacom announce on the 23rd of July.

 

[BigCheez]

Lets wait and see wat Seacom announce on the 23rd of July.

I bet they won't be announcing that they have a problem with their repeaters, but its hard to imagine anchor or trawling damage at that depth (4,700m below the surface). Apparently landslide is the current hope...

It would be nice if they announced completion of the European leg, instead of continually pushing the deadline back a couple of months at a time in the hope that no-one notices!

 

[rusty1404]

Mweb currently use SAT3 and SEACOM. Their low cost uncapped users are all on SEACOM. The business products use SAT3 and SEACOM.

Mweb currently purchase x bandwidth on SAT3 for R10.00 .
Mweb currently purchase x bandwidth on SEACOM for R1.00 .

EASSY is selling x bandwidth at R0.70 .

Once Mweb can be reasonably confident that EASSY is acceptable reliable for the product's requirement.

With EASSY/SEACOM redundancy Mweb could reduce the price and increase the quality of their business products.

With EASSY/SEACOM redundancy Mweb could reduce the price and increase the quality of their home products.

Remember that business ADSL has been historically restricted to SAT3/SAFE. Although this system of cables has been highly reliable over the years, it's just a single cable system. SAFE is no longer truly up to the task of providing full redundancy for SAT3.

SEACOM has been with us for a year, but cannot be considered suitable for business use due to their abysmal reliability record.

If EASSY delivers an even mildly competent product, then ISP's can compel SEACOM to make a move on either reliability or pricing to compete. Given the 30 pricing advantage that EASSY enters the market at and combined with SEACOM's disastrous reliability, EASSY would have to be significantly more (20%) unreliable than SEACOM to have no impact.

At the moment we have SAT3 which cannot be afforded. SEACOM which cannot be trusted. Remember SEACOM is currently dysfunctional, so the validation requirements for and period for EASSY should be lowered and shortened respectively by a significant margin. SEACOM is currently not functional and ineffective therefore EASSY need only be similarly untrustworthy to justify the risk of using it.