Vumatel to launch 10Gbit/s home fibre in South Africa

I don't want to sound like the "Bill Gates 640kb is enough for everybody", but I really struggle to even fully utilise my 1Gbps at home, aside from the odd massive game download or "Linux Torrents."

I mean it's great to download 140Gb or so in 10-15 minutes, but it doesn't really happen that often. Most of the time my line idles around 10-40mbps peaks during regular usage in a household of 4 with pretty much streaming being our only major consumer of traffic.

As content size and requirements evolve 4K+ etc, I'm sure it will start creeping upwards in terms of requirements, but I haven't seen a major game changer that will realistically tax my 1Gbps service up to even 60-70% of capacity in a constant basis.

Unless you're downloading the internet. Or have specific requirements for major media upload/downloads such as is required for @jannier 's occupation.

Look, it's all about bragging rights. Do I need 10Gbs? No. Do I want it? Hell yes!
 
Bragging rights Hell yea. But what is the bragging rights going to cost for Setup(Hardware) and then the monthly fee which will have to spit out
Well setup could be around R7-15k routers, switches etc. and monthly shouldn't be more than R2k - R3.5k for a 2.5Gbps or 5Gbps line....10Gbps is still business level requirements. All in all, it's not cheap but nothing is at the beginning.
 
When I have electricity installed into my house, I don't choose the max connection amperage based on what I expect to use on average, I instead have it be higher than I'll ever reasonably need at any particular moment.

Internet speed in my view should ideally be the same, I would want a 10Gbps connection (or perhaps only 2.5Gbps for now due to equipment costs) so that I practically never have a situation where any of the devices on my network run slower than my LAN speed, i.e. they ideally never "interfere" with each other.

With my current 100Mbps connection at most times it's there for me, except for the rare occasions where I'm doing some update/download which is 10's of GB in size, in which case it might interfere with someone else gaming / VoIPing / streaming in the household.

Aside from fees to OpenServe, it would make no difference to Cool Ideas if my line speed was higher as my overall bandwidth consumption wouldn't change, just for brief moments I would be using more bandwidth, but for less time as those downloads take less time on the higher speed, evening out overall.

I foresee fibre equipment costs getting to the point in the not-too-distant future where the "lowest" cost equipment has line speeds which are so large that they're largely irrelevant since no one ever uses all the bandwidth for more than a few seconds at a time.

This would mean that from a cost perspective, there is nothing stopping ISPs from offering 2.5Gbps or even 10Gbps connections to every house hold.

This of course will create a problem for ISPs in it being harder to differentiate their offerings since very few people would care to pay extra for higher speeds since it would make no practical difference to them. Of course infrastructure companies and their investors (Vumatel, OpenServe, MFN, etc) will try fend this off as long as they possibly can by artificially keeping the price high in order to continue creating lots of profit.

I wonder if the end game lands up being us going back to usage based billing like with electricity, although I hope not.

It would be best for society if internet becomes just another utility which has a marginal standard cost, which would be best for economies as it's an economic enabler which ideally shouldn't be hindered by unreasonabley high profits for corporations and shareholders.

Fortunately SA has lots of competition in the FNO space, so that will hopefully keep things good for consumers, unless we land up with a mobile network situation where there is (even if not officially, but for all intents and purposes) collusion between all the providers to keep prices high.
 
Aside from fees to OpenServe, it would make no difference to Cool Ideas if my line speed was higher as my overall bandwidth consumption wouldn't change, just for brief moments I would be using more bandwidth, but for less time as those downloads take less time on the higher speed, evening out overall.
Not really, ISP pay for a fixed bandwidth available on a connection, e.g. port at Teraco, x Mbps/Gbps on international lines, whether utilized or not.
If they need to support people bursting higher, then they need to get more capacity.
If their pool is bigger though, it's not that much of an issue, and generally for over 1Gbps speeds it's usually fine as most servers will not let you max your connection, but for those that can, ISP would have to make sure it can provide your burst and everyone else.

Current ISP here in Austria, I have a 500Mbps burst line, with 250Mbps "guaranteed", works fine as most work files etc. are within Vienna servers, so get full speed, and steam downloads and stuff start at full speed, so small patches are quick, and longer ones then average around 300Mbps.
ISP designed it that it's the same cost as the 250Mbps package, they just get better average speedtest rates and stuff (also helps with government subsidies for rolling out more networks, since that ones is based on average speed delivered), and then evenings can lower as peak happens, so worth it for them (note contract has in writing as max, normal and min, with at least 90% normal have to be available, haven't ever seen it below normal though, below min is breach of contract/month is free at 50Mbps).
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Not really, ISP pay for a fixed bandwidth available on a connection, e.g. port at Teraco, x Mbps/Gbps on international lines, whether utilized or not.
If they need to support people bursting higher, then they need to get more capacity.
If their pool is bigger though, it's not that much of an issue, and generally for over 1Gbps speeds it's usually fine as most servers will not let you max your connection, but for those that can, ISP would have to make sure it can provide your burst and everyone else.

Current ISP here in Austria, I have a 500Mbps burst line, with 250Mbps "guaranteed", works fine as most work files etc. are within Vienna servers, so get full speed, and steam downloads and stuff start at full speed, so small patches are quick, and longer ones then average around 300Mbps.
ISP designed it that it's the same cost as the 250Mbps package, they just get better average speedtest rates and stuff (also helps with government subsidies for rolling out more networks, since that ones is based on average speed delivered), and then evenings can lower as peak happens, so worth it for them (note contract has in writing as max, normal and min, with at least 90% normal have to be available, haven't ever seen it below normal though, below min is breach of contract/month is free at 50Mbps).
Speaking under correction, I don't think any ISP's in SA guarantee any minimum speeds on consumer packages, they all best effort. You would have to pay 5x more to get a business package with an SLA. I must commend Cool Ideas tough, I have been on the 1Gig line for about 3.5 years and pretty much always get close to 1 Gig, even to european servers. What is weird is it appears that a lot of local SA based CDN's cap you at around 200Mbps. Changing DNS to an international server will max a 1Gig line.

London
 
Not really, ISP pay for a fixed bandwidth available on a connection, e.g. port at Teraco, x Mbps/Gbps on international lines, whether utilized or not.

When base speeds far exceed typical usage this actually becomes less of a problem as average line utilization per customer becomes a much smaller percentage.

If hypothetically both me and my neighbour had our line speeds doubled from 500Mbps to 1000Mbps, but we were each the same in that we wouldn't overall download any more despite the faster speed. Most of the time when I am bursting with the extra speed my neighbour would be largely idle and vice-versa, furthermore, because our downloads can now take half the time, it reduces the timeframe in which I would be wanting full line speed at the same time as my neighbour, further reducing possible contention.

In the event that we do happen to both be doing big downloads at the same time, I wouldn't care in that moment it was slower for me.

At higher speeds and more users it is even less likely that there will be contention, if you have 100 users, all having their line speed doubled from 500 to 1000Mbps, but all the same in that they wouldn't increase their overall usage, the chances of everyone wanting to burst at the exact same time is very unlikely so in practice everyone will almost always experience full 1000Mbps bursts for the rare times they do it, even though the ISP may not have provisioned any extra bandwidth since upgrading everyone from 500 to 1000Mbps.

Gone are the days where we're always waiting a long time for downloads, the systems now have a lot more slack. In my case I would get by fine at a mere 25Mbps, I have not meaningfully changed my overall downloaded amount despite being upgraded to 100Mbps now. Aside from OpenServe fees, my costs as a customer have not really meaningfully increased for Cool Ideas despite my line speed having quadrupled.

My point being that once the base speed is high enough, aside from equipment costs it makes almost no difference, e.g. whether or not you give each household a 2.5Gbps or 10Gbps connection will probably not meaningfully change required available bandwidth.
 
Get about 2.2Gbps on a Blizzard download (that's from our cache obviously)

International multithread about the same 2.2Gbps.

Local speedtest 4.4Gbps.

Which is pretty expected given parameters and a single device.

So not really feasible for most customers 2.5Gbps would be better as a next step (?) of ever
 
Get about 2.2Gbps on a Blizzard download (that's from our cache obviously)

International multithread about the same 2.2Gbps.

Local speedtest 4.4Gbps.

Which is pretty expected given parameters and a single device.
That 4.4Gbps sounds oddly familiar, like the max speed of a SATA SSD.
 
That 4.4Gbps sounds oddly familiar, like the max speed of a SATA SSD.
Not sure, machine has a Samsung SSD 980 PRO NVME

Servers should be serving the data in the test from Memory and not disk.
 
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Not sure, machine has a Samsung SSD 980 PRO NVME

Servers should be serving the data in the test from Memory and not disk.
It could be purely coincidental of course but 4.4Gbps is 550MB/s which the max speed of a SATA SSD.
 
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