I find it amazing that every time Telkom is fking out, you are here blaming it on infrastructure, yet all i do is connect to a different ISP, and all of the sudden everything is fine. A blind man can tell you that aint infrastructure.
Very odd.
Not the same actual transmission fibre.
Telkom Internet's Northern IPC POP is in Centurion (on the same campus as Telkom Wholesale's NNOC), but connected by Telkom Wholesale transmission to IPC hand-off routers in two different Telkom Wholesale core sites in Johammesburg which are both ~40km away..
Telkom Internet peers at Teraco JB1, and the links from the peering routers to the rest of the network also go back to Centurion (over some of the same fibre paths). Telkom Wholesale wasn't able to.provide SLAs on at least half of this capacity (going to one of the core sites). At the time, we were ordering additional capacity (to leave idle 99% of the time), but with our capacities Telkom Wholesale had long lead times (as thet had to order equipment from overseas suppliers and then get it installed in multiple sites which all have strict change management processes). We were ordering most upgradea about 10 months in advance of our projected requirement, and still often that was too little time ...
Most other ISPs host their IPC POPs in:
- Rosebank (with IS) which is less than 5km from one of the core sites mentioned above and less than 10km from the othet
- Teraco JB1 which is less than 20km from one of the core sites listed above, and less than 30km from the other.
Those won't be affeced by transmission failures north of the northern bypass (N1/N3), where Telkom Internet is.
Also, while other ISPs have to use Telkom Wholesale circuits for IPC (which, BTW. doesn't offer SLAs), they don't have to for other network capacity. However, Telkom Internet was required to buy all network services from Telkom Wholesale unless they couldn't provide the service.
This is why Telkom Internet is affected when some other ISPs aren't.
One of the reasons I left was because of this politics which made it difficult to offer competitive services. We had hoped to be able to get more siverse transmission (e.g. buy some transmissiom circuits from Neotel or Vodacom or MTN or some other provider that had routes totally independant from Telkom Wholesale), but it became clear that this wouldn't be allowed because it may impact Telkom Wholesale too much. The other alternative was to request Telkom Wholesale to locate IPC hand-over routers in the NNOC, which would also have brought them, Telkom Mobile and other Wholesale.customers many benefits and would be more beneficial for the Telkom group, but this wasn't agreeable to some people at Wholesale due to "office politics".
(These issues are also why it would actually be good for Telkom retail if they were a separate legal entity from Telkom Wholesale/Openserve, so that business-critical decisons aren't made using non-business reasons)
