Neotel calms SEACOM redundancy concerns
SEACOM’s recent landing has brought competition to the local international bandwidth market which was previously dominated by the SAT-3/SAFE system. The new cable system has already resulted in significant price reductions on SAT-3/SAFE, and is likely to continue to put pressure on international bandwidth tariffs in future.
One of the concerns from industry players is that SEACOM does not provide adequate redundancy which means that service providers must still use SAT-3 as a west coast route in case there are problems on SEACOM.
Internet Solutions’ CEO Angus MacRobert said that SEACOM’s lack of redundancy is one of the weaknesses of the system. He added that SAT-3/SAFE’s redundancy means that it is a premier product where higher pricing is justified. MacRobert expects significant price reductions when the second west coast cable – WACS – comes on board as this will resolve the redundancy concerns on SEACOM.
Some industry players have also raised concerns about the redundancy of Neotel’s transmission network from its Midrand data centre to the Mtunzini SEACOM landing station. Here Neotel said that these concerns are unfounded as their network provides physical redundancy in case of cable breaks.
“Neotel’s national network is built to provide high availability services, which are backed by service level agreements with our customers. This includes multiple routes between major centres, providing physical redundancy in the case of cable breaks,” said Neotel CTO Angus Hay.
Bandwidth on SEACOM is typically sold as a service from Johannesburg to London, eliminating concerns over high local bandwidth fees associated with the SAT-3 cable. Neotel’s Midrand data centre serves as a SEACOM Point-of-Presence (POP) where other service providers can collocate or use Neotel to provide them with SEACOM bandwidth to their own POP.
“The SEACOM cable itself provides a linear route from South Africa to Europe (and a similar route to India); Neotel provides backhaul across its national network to complete the PoP to PoP SEACOM service to Midrand,” explains Hay.
“The new Midrand Data Centre is a critical hub on this network, with multiple optical fibre routes linking it to surrounding metropolitan area network points of presence, and from there into the national backbone.”
Hay added that the Neotel national network uses a mesh topology for IP services, and a ring topology for transmission services, both carried over 10 Gbps DWDM wavelengths, to ensure maximum availability.
The Neotel CTO highlights that while Neotel has been present in the SAFE landing station in Mtunzini for some time, with connectivity into the national network, a new, physically separate Neotel optical fibre route was recently built from Mtunzini to Durban to provide additional capacity and redundancy for SEACOM when the new landing station was constructed.
“With SAFE, SEACOM, and, in future, EASSy landing at Mtunzini, the town has become a major hub on the Neotel network, and has been appropriately connected into the national network with multiple physical routes,” says Hay.
“In addition to linear services on SEACOM, Neotel is able to offer restorable or fully protected capacity across multiple cable systems (SAT-3, SAFE and SEACOM, and onward via the global Tata Communications network), with fully protected backhaul to any point on the Neotel network in South Africa for those customers that require end-to-end redundancy. Other customers may opt to establish their own redundancy by buying separate linear services on different cable systems,” Hay concluded.
Neotel and SEACOM redundancy – give your views
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