You are blaming...who?

SabreWolfy said:
What should that plan be exactly? Existing capacity via SAT3 is saturated. Everyone who relies on SEACOM is now using SAT3. There just is not enough existing capacity. EASSy will improve the situation I expect.
Click to expand...

I was more referring to what response they eventually mustered with the available resources. Seems like everything was a bit "oh **** what now?" when Seacom went down.

EASSy, hopefully, will make a huge difference.
 
SabreWolfy said:
All ISPs and institutions using SEACOM are now routing through the much smaller SAT3 cable. It's saturated right now.
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Yes, I imagine the capacity that has been bought is rather saturated (or at least the portion leased by SAIX). That makes a lot of sense if MWeb went and negotiated some kind of deal with SAIX. But, I remember a news report some time back that mentioned that only a fraction of the cable's physical carrying capacity had been lit.

Guess we can blame Telkom for the fact that the cable is so undersold, due to their ridiculous pricing I suppose.

Why the bigger Seacom based ISPs haven't managed to successfully use their bandwidth volumes as leverage to negotiate better pricing on SAT3 by now is also baffling.

SabreWolfy said:
No idea about satellite.
Click to expand...

Wish somebody would communicate with us as to why that option hasn't been explored.

SabreWolfy said:
I presume Business users are given priority on SAT3.
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Naturally. On the more expensive packages, I would want assurances that sufficient backup capacity was in place so that I experience no disruption in service (at full speed). On the cheaper packages, I still want reliability and I will happily sacrifice performance in a fail over situation. Sadly, we don't get a low performance alternative. We get just about nothing for our money during this time. For that, I believe we can be justifiably upset.
 
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SabreWolfy said:
All ISPs and institutions using SEACOM are now routing through the much smaller SAT3 cable. It's saturated right now.
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Are you talking about projected capacity or "lit" capacity?

It's not saturated; they are just taking zero chances with the SWC broadcasts and want to prevent congestion on these links.
 
epeer said:
<snip>
Yes, I imagine the capacity that has been bought is rather saturated (or at least the portion leased by SAIX). That makes a lot of sense if MWeb went and negotiated some kind of deal with SAIX. But, I remember a news report some time back that mentioned that only a fraction of the cable's physical carrying capacity had been lit.
<snip>
Click to expand...

I recall reading that with respect to SEACOM, not SAT3. SAT3 is a tiny cable in comparison to SEACOM, so I presume all/most of SAT3 is sold. Which other cable would we have used pre-SEACOM?
 
moggie said:
Are you talking about projected capacity or "lit" capacity?

It's not saturated; they are just taking zero chances with the SWC broadcasts and want to prevent congestion on these links.
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Well if some of the capacity is "reserved" for a subscribing company, that may as well be considered "lit" in terms of what's left for MWeb, etc. to use.
 
SabreWolfy said:
Well if some of the capacity is "reserved" for a subscribing company, that may as well be considered "lit" in terms of what's left for MWeb, etc. to use.
Click to expand...

No. To light up additional costs plenty of moolah. To reserve "lit" capacity indicates a flawed business model and I doubt that is the case.

MacNutter said:
I think Telskum also use SAFE do they not?
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Yes, SAFE is the redundant routing for SAT-3 (and then there is the satellite link).
 
MacNutter said:
I think Telskum also use SAFE do they not? I blame lack of redundancy on SEACOM not mweb. Cool posts sabre.
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Thanks :) Telkom use SAT3 and SAFE AFAIK. Good point though -- SEACOM should provide redundancy actually!
 
moggie said:
No. To light up additional costs plenty of moolah. To reserve "lit" capacity indicates a flawed business model and I doubt that is the case.
<snip>
Click to expand...

Well, either way, the SAT3 pie has to be divided between everyone now. Hence, everyone is getting a smaller piece of the pie, because now there is only one pie.
 
SabreWolfy said:
All ISPs and institutions using SEACOM are now routing through the much smaller SAT3 cable.
Click to expand...

<snip>
The US$ 600 million Seacom system has a design capacity of 1.28 Tbps, but will initially only be equipped at 80 Gbps. This is lower than the current SAT3-SAFE system’s 120 Gbps, and Telkom has indicated that it is set to upgrade the SAT3-SAFE system next month after the members of the consortium agreed to invest in additional bandwidth capacity.

According to Ajith Bridgraj, Telkom's Senior Specialist for Media Relations, the SAT3-SAFE capacity will be upgraded from its current 120 Gbps to 340 Gbps.
</snip>

Source: http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Telecoms/8879.html

SAT3 @ 120Gbps > Seacom @ 80Gbps?

The article was published almost a year ago, so I assume the SAT3 cable is up to the 340Gbps by now.

Then, take into account that the SAFE portion of the cable almost doubles the capacity for full redundancy and you get oodles of spare capacity (neither one of those cables is currently in failure mode).

Am I missing something?
 
@epeer: No idea, because I can't get to the international sites to check what I posted :) My understanding was that SEACOM provided a much greater capacity than SAT3. The last I recall reading is that 10% of SEACOM's 1.2Tbps was lit.
 
Having said all that, then if SAT3 capacity > SEACOM, why should a SEACOM outage cause any problems? Everyone using SEACOM just shifts over to SAT3 and continues as normal. If SAT3 > SEACOM there would not be any congestion on SAT3 and we'd all be browsing internationally.
 
SEACOM seems to be created using a loo roll, black sticky tape and a few strands of pasta.

Jesus wept, i've never known something to be so unstable. Did they anchor it down with jelly? Do they let anyone with a spade dig around the landing spots?
 
SabreWolfy said:
Having said all that, then if SAT3 capacity > SEACOM, why should a SEACOM outage cause any problems? Everyone using SEACOM just shifts over to SAT3 and continues as normal. If SAT3 > SEACOM there would not be any congestion on SAT3 and we'd all be browsing internationally.
Click to expand...

You are assuming that current SAT3 utilization is less than 40Gbps, assuming that SAT3 is 120Gpbs. I doubt it has been upgraded already.

SAT3 might be bigger, but trying to jam all the traffic that normally would be carried by Seacom into whatever SAT3 has lying around is going to have a negative effect.
 
Phenomenon said:
You are assuming that SAT3 utilization is less than 40Gbps, assuming that SAT3 is 120Gpbs. I doubt it has been upgraded already.
Click to expand...

It was upgraded earlier this year to accommodate the FIFA requirements.
 
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