Will Seacom enable a sea change?

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rpm

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Will Seacom enable a sea change?

Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth. It is a problem which is as old as the Internet is in South Africa and which is seemingly impossible to solve with an intractable Department of Communications, an obstinate monopoly and an unwilling government as primary obstacles.
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However, the inevitable fly in the ointment concerns how access to that bandwidth is to be managed. “The best case scenario is that the rights are sold to competing organizations; the worst case scenario is that it is monopolized by Telkom.
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Please God no!!!!!
 
I vote for a seacom article generator, throw in key words everyone seems to use and poof, a gazillion articles all saying the same thing, then hopefully the journalists will catch a wake up and stop writing the same stuff over & over.

+1 ban on general seacom articles unless its guaranteed to be new news.
 
This reminds me of the Telkom tv ad for isdn(which was still on tv) back when adsl just about started taking off with the doctor performing surgery remotely.

i am not convinced prices will really come down, just watch there will be an excuse of some 'costs' and the price will remain the norm minus a lesser % discount even thoseacom publishes its prices.
 
I think they mean to say Tera-bits..

Getting tired of all these Seacom and "bandwidth starved SA" articles. Nothing worth mentioning has changed since the first few articles. We know its coming and we trust that it will be delivered on time, the whole world is watching remember :-)
 
dotnerd said:
Getting tired of all these Seacom and "bandwidth starved SA" articles. Nothing worth mentioning has changed since the first few articles. We know its coming and we trust that it will be delivered on time, the whole world is watching remember :-)
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Couldn't have said it better myself...
 
Ofcourse the prices will remain the same. The amount of data we can use will increase... hopefully... really hopefully...
 
... Which means that prices are effectively falling per unit....
 
can I please edit my previous statment about 1/2 articles beeing written about Seacom and NeoFlex.... I think 1/2 a day has become more like it..

Nothing has changed in a month except a whole lot more talk...

did each writer at mybb get the job of writing a article a week on seacom and neoflex?!?!!?

let wait and talk after somthing ahs happened....

PS : somehow I think its a bit like the pot of gold at the end f the rainbow.....
 
“What we have thought of as a fast connection in this country to date, is not even broadband. International access remains the real bottleneck which inhibits the capability of especially voice and video applications to run satisfactorily,” Yssel says.
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Actually ... although this is partly true, the real problem is that the prices for local hosting bandwidth are ridiculous, hindering our ability to develop our own content.
See : http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php?p=2338636#post2338636 ; Multichoice is being forced to host internationally.
 
Ok - here's the deal. I have devised a simple test that will indicate two things with a single result.

It goes like this :
Is the normal price of 3G data 5c or less per megabyte ?

Yes = SEACOM is a success AND write more articles about it
No = SEACOM is not yet a success DON'T write more articles about it.

So people please, apply that simple test BEFORE writing anything about SEACOM and for that matter bandwidth prices in South Africa.

Thank you.
 
While 1.5Tbps sounds impressive, this is not the launch capacity of the cable. It is the design limit with current technology. We can expect only a few Gbps from late next year. Also, the segment from SA supports only half that at 640 Gbps.

The price of international will come down, but currently only makes up about 30% of a broadband service's cost. So instead of R199 for 384/3G and 1GB, I expect something like R199 for 384/3G and 3GB. I expect the entry level to still be around R200 a month for any useful broadband service regardless of international bandwidth prices.

Since local bw is currently around the R10 mark per GB, it also seems reasonable to expect that international won't fall below R10 per GB, due to local transit to the landing stations. What we will probably see is the scrapping of local/international distinction and just have pure blended bw packages. Bw prices, i'm guessing, around R20/GB to keep the network congestion down.

I'll be intersted to read these posts in 6 months time to see who called it right!
 
What we mustn't forget as well is that it isn't necessarily the international link that is holding bandwidth back in SA, it is the local loop that is a problem as well, and with all this optical fibre that is bein laid by various companies costing them billions of rands, don't you think they will be needing some sort of ROI for all this. So i don't really think Seacom will be necessarily the white knight we are hoping for, more likely it will require all the other components to come together. I think that the players in the market will not be able to carry the cost of huge reductions in prices, think of all the business' that will die and all the jobs that will be lost when you will only be able to make a couple bucks off a connection and cap. I think retail prices will remain the same, maybe the cost price will go down, plus what you get for that price will increase. I would like to see changes like this, pricing on the left applies, speed on the right.

384 line becomes 1mb line
512 mb line becomes 4mb line
4mb mb line becomes 8mb line
and all the caps go up by like 10-20 times+...

I think these sort of numbers will fall more inline with international trends...and with what is available.
 
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