UUNet ADSL Accounts

[Carlhead]

Why is UUnet dependant on SAIX/Telsum if it has its own national backbone and its own pipes in the SAT3?

The users connect to ASDL on Telkom's network. (you ADSL line is with Telkom not UUNet).

You also have to connect to content on the South African network, it would be silly routing all that traffic back of the SAT3 links then via international peers... so naturally they peer with the local providers.

 

[Carlhead]

Yikes! I'd hate to ask! That is the one part of your post I was not aware of.

But this does not really add much to your statement "selling at R750 is extremely risky". If they are running as much of their infrastructure themselves as they can without breaking the silly laws, and are not paying Telkom on a gigabyte basis, I think the costs I mentioned are likely to be in the ball park. I fail to see the big risk. (They are sure to inflate their price in line with "the market", however absurd THAT has become - that is just business.) Unless you know different.

They pay for line speed... you can only get X amount of gigs though a pipe... if you have 10 000 people with uncapped internet all downloading link banshee's, then you can imagine what kind of strain it would put on the network... remember they have a couple of hundred megs international linking and a couple of hundred megs peering... (10 000 x R750 = R7 500 000... and 10 000 * 512k = 5120 MB/s) if you do the maths... you'll see that if thier users push a lot of traffic, they will not be able to upgrade thier infrastructure in line with the requirement.

 

[jabulani]

if you do the maths... you'll see that if thier users push a lot of traffic, they will not be able to upgrade thier infrastructure in line with the requirement.

Your numbers are very vague unfortunately. To work such things out realistically one has to virtually do a whole business plan and factor in times-of-day, contention, usage stats and a hundred other things that us outsiders have no access to.

I still do not believe the R750 is in any way risky for them. If you glean any actual cost figures from your contacts there please let us know.

 

[Freshy-ZN]

The users connect to ASDL on Telkom's network. (you ADSL line is with Telkom not UUNet).

You also have to connect to content on the South African network, it would be silly routing all that traffic back of the SAT3 links then via international peers... so naturally they peer with the local providers.

I appreciate that Telkom owns the last mile and that you have to peer with other local backbones like SAIX and IS. But is this not what happens anywhere in the world? Is it not a symbiotic relationships that (should) exist with all local backbone operators? What if UUnet didnt allow SAIX onto its backbone, would SAIX not be performing a disservice to its customers? And vice versa.

Seems like SAIX (especially) and the other backbone providers are not following the true spirit of the net (inter-connectivity) and are holding each other ransom to access on their networks when without interconnectivity they would be nothing.

 

[Carlhead]

Your numbers are very vague unfortunately. To work such things out realistically one has to virtually do a whole business plan and factor in times-of-day, contention, usage stats and a hundred other things that us outsiders have no access to.

I still do not believe the R750 is in any way risky for them. If you glean any actual cost figures from your contacts there please let us know.

Given my number are extremely vague... I don't have the facts and figures.

But if you think of it from a logic point of view, they don't have all that much connectivity; uncapped ADSL is bandwidth hungry... I know they ran into massive problems with congestion on the peering links when they launched the service... to alieviate the pressure on their sub-marine links they routed traffic over satalite.

Remember UUnetSA has to be profitable seperately to the MCI/UUnet group.

 

[Carlhead]

I appreciate that Telkom owns the last mile and that you have to peer with other local backbones like SAIX and IS. But is this not what happens anywhere in the world? Is it not a symbiotic relationships that (should) exist with all local backbone operators? What if UUnet didnt allow SAIX onto its backbone, would SAIX not be performing a disservice to its customers? And vice versa.

Seems like SAIX (especially) and the other backbone providers are not following the true spirit of the net (inter-connectivity) and are holding each other ransom to access on their networks when without interconnectivity they would be nothing.

You see the problem is SAIX = Telkom... so yes they are definitely not in the spirit of providing internet connectivty as a whole.

I doesn't work the same way all over the world because they have liberal markets and thier telecoms providers have been forced to unbundle the local loop.

 

[Carlhead]

I didn't have ADSL at the time when UUNET-SA had their previous attempt at ADSL accounts going, but the feedback on MyADSL from forumites, indicated a steady decline in QoS, if UUNET-SA are now confident that their new ADSL model will resolve all those issues, then a concrete SLA would be a most attractive selling point...

Due to the nature of the internet is South Africa, it would be impossible for UUNet to offer a documented SLA for remotely reasonable costs... interconnectivity in this country is just too expensive... take a look at the difference in cost between diginet silver and gold to give you an indication of jus how much a few Kbits of international connectivity costs on a 1:1 scale.

 

[Freshy-ZN]

My guess is that large parts of UUNET-SA's national backbone are in fact rented from Telkodemonopoly bcos according to the monopolistic legislation, only Telkodemonopoly & Sentech have been allowed to self-provision their own links [although as of 2005-02-01 add to that Vodacom, MTN and CellC]...

Good point. Forgot about that.

 

[Crash]

UUNET Uncapped

If I remember correctly the steady decline in QOS on the UUNET uncapped was because they oversold the service. Simple as that.

UUNET have no shortage of bandwidth. Remember they are the upstream provider for iBurst. 5000 people X 1mbps..... (In Theory), they must have been able to support it, else they would have not got the contract.

My experiences with UUNET in terms of co-located servers was, they have excellent bandwidth and speed, they just seem to fall down with customer service. Nothing major, but I expected a bit more from them.

 

[ambo]

Although UUnet may own their own 'network' - ICASA's licence still only permits Telkom and SNO to provision network links across boundaries.
I think there's a bit of a grey area with regard to wireless but i am specifically referring to cable and fibre links that still have to be provided be telkom in order for UUnet (and IS for that matter) to link their nodes and infrastructure.

 

[Carlhead]

Carlhead, to answer your original question, if UUNET-SA could give an SLA-type assurance that latency would be low-ish and stable during normal business hours, at a competitive price, with no shaping of say VoIP, then I would be interested .

One interesting thing to note, is that the ECB makes allowances for class licences to be issued by ICASA - basically means that IS and UUNET-SA etc etc etc could all apply for a licence to self-provision their own peering links within the same municipal area(s) - without going through Telkodemonopoly at all - bye bye Telkodemonopoly's Diginet...but it all depends on when the ECB becomes the ECA - AFAIK el presidente has not signed it into effect yet...

Basically peering links should start to cost a lot less after initial installation costs which can be recovered over time in a reasonable business model between peering partners...

Sounds really interesting... I'm off to investigate further

 

[Carlhead]

If I remember correctly the steady decline in QOS on the UUNET uncapped was because they oversold the service. Simple as that.

They never ran our of bandwidth, it was simply putting too much preasure on thier network; so they routed the traffic via satalite.

UUNET have no shortage of bandwidth. Remember they are the upstream provider for iBurst. 5000 people X 1mbps..... (In Theory), they must have been able to support it, else they would have not got the contract.

Remember the contention ratio's for iBurst are very high.. UUNet definitely doesn't have 5000MBits of conectivity in/out of this country. (only a few hundred in fact)... same goes for IS and SAIX though.

My experiences with UUNET in terms of co-located servers was, they have excellent bandwidth and speed, they just seem to fall down with customer service. Nothing major, but I expected a bit more from them.

[/QUOTE]

Their dedicated side of things is excellent... all our local web server are connected to the UUNet backbone, access times are brilliant, and uptime is very good too.

 

[Carlhead]

I still do not believe the R750 is in any way risky for them. If you glean any actual cost figures from your contacts there please let us know.

Forgot to say, remember UUnet didn't sell the uncapped solution at R750 the ISP's were... I can say that the ISP would be making a descent profit if they are selling for R750 if they are putting any kind of volumes though UUNet.

 

[krycor]

i wonder if they will sell capped accounts and how cheap they will sell it, or will they just follow trends like every other company in SA.

 

[Carlhead]

i wonder if they will sell capped accounts and how cheap they will sell it, or will they just follow trends like every other company in SA.

I believe UUNet will be selling on a per GB basis to the ISP's, then it's up to the ISP's to make the packages.

i just hope that the per GB rate is good, so we can offer the cost benefits to our clients.

 

[Crash]

Remember the contention ratio's for iBurst are very high.. UUNet definitely doesn't have 5000MBits of conectivity in/out of this country. (only a few hundred in fact)... same goes for IS and SAIX though.

Sorry Carlhead, I wasn't implying they give 1 to 1 contention Ratio. It's probably more like 1 : 100, I was just making a point that they must have a decent pipe to offer this sort of service.

Remember they also recently lost Mweb as a client (Moved to IS). That would remove a lot of traffic from there network.

 

[Carlhead]

Sorry Carlhead, I wasn't implying they give 1 to 1 contention Ratio. It's probably more like 1 : 100, I was just making a point that they must have a decent pipe to offer this sort of service.

Remember they also recently lost Mweb as a client (Moved to IS). That would remove a lot of traffic from there network.

OIC, they have 3x 45MBit/s on SAT3 and I'm sure of thier local peering or satalite bandwidth.

Didn't Mweb move to SAIX?

 

[Carlhead]

<off_topic>

AFAIK at the SAIEE Broadband Shootout, WBS said WBS did not have contention ratios, which to me basically means that there is no effective control over the number of customers trying to use any particular iBurst base-station.​

</off_topic>

It must mean that... I spoke to IS regards the contension ratios on MyWireless/Sentech, they just told me that they are confidential

 

[ganymede1]

Last i heard no uncapped solutions.... really bleak because they are really good.

 

[Carlhead]

Last i heard no uncapped solutions.... really bleak because they are really good.

There have been many rumors, but this has not been confirmed or denied.