Bandwidth starvation continues
A new online service Earth-Touch.com recently launched their online portal, promising near-live footage of wildlife around the world in high definition video.
This service aims to challenge mainstream players such as National Geographic and the Discovery Channel. Earth Touch uses satellite links to retrieve wildlife footage from filming locations around the globe and then publish it within 24 hours.
The site however hit a snag – the high cost of bandwidth in South Africa. The solution is one which most high-bandwidth online services use, and that is to host overseas.
“Yesterday we maxed our 100Mbit/s connection,” says online creative director Brian Palmer, after Notcot.org featured the site. “That’s a whole lot of video moving at about 45Gb/hour.”
Palmer says the website is hosted overseas because of the high cost of local bandwidth, which costs between R90 and R150 per gigabyte with local hosting companies.
“On average we need about 30-35 terabytes a month. At South African rates, that would run into millions of rands. Internationally, we pay less than R40 000 a month for unlimited premium bandwidth.”
While many South African websites serving a local audience are already hosted overseas, such a solution is not available to Professor Bruce Hewittson from the University of Cape Town.
Hewittson is a climate researcher, and his research demands the upload and download of large amounts of data. His organization uploads data to an IBM server in Colorado, but due to the high bandwidth costs only some of the summary data is received back by Hewittson.
To get access to the full data they use a courier service which Hewittson says is not only cheaper but also faster than trying to download all the data from the US.
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