ADSL international bandwidth redundancy: ISPs explain
Over the last twelve months SEACOM has not been very stable. The cable system experienced various problems, including downtime caused by a submarine repeater failure which lasted for weeks.
Last year many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) put plans in place to protect against SEACOM downtime which paid off this month when three separate incidents which caused international connectivity issues on the cable.
Many ISPs – including MWEB, Altech Technology Concepts (ATC), Neology and Cybersmart – have fully redundant international links to guard against cable downtime leaving their customers without international Internet access.
ISPs and their international connectivity
MWEB
MWEB has full redundancy through SEACOM and SAT-3. In December 2010, MWEB announced that they had landed SAT-3 cable capacity in its Cape Town node, boosting their international capacity and bringing more redundancy to their network.
In the case of SEACOM downtime, SAT-3 bandwidth is used by all customers to ensure continued international Internet access – but certain services such as BitTorrent are heavily shaped during the downtime to ensure the link does not become congested.
Altech Technology Concepts
ATC also has full redundancy through SEACOM and SAT-3 with equal capacity on both cables.
ATC further illustrated the robustness of its network configuration to guard against service interruptions during the latest SEACOM outage. “Our particular configuration means that not one of our customers experienced slowing of connection speeds, never mind downtime,” said ATC CEO Wayne de Nobrega.
Afrihost
Afrihost customers currently lose international Internet access when SEACOM goes down, but this is set to change says CEO Gian Visser.
“Afrihost’s upstream provider IS have secured overseas links and are waiting for them to be commissioned. They will be making use of the SAT3 network as well as the EASSy and WACS network when they are fully operational,” says Visser.
“In the meantime if there is an outage on SEACOM, all Afrihost ADSL clients can use proxy servers we set up. These servers will allow international connectivity (albeit slower) through our hosting bandwidth on the SAT3 network.”
Neology
ISP Neology has gone to whole hog with circuits on EASSy, SEACOM and SAT3, and is offering fully redundant solutions on these cable systems to customers.
Cybersmart
Cybersmart has full redundancy on SEACOM and SAT-3, and is offering their subscribers the option of a fully restored service which ismore expensive than a non-restored SEACOM only service.
Web Africa
Web Africa’s Cliff Hazell explains that their focus has been on reliability and quality performance from the start, and as a result they selected SAT-3 for primary international connectivity.
“In the event of an international outage, we de-prioritise P2P traffic and have sufficient redundancy via SEACOM to carry remaining critical traffic, with priority given to our Business Customers,” said Hazell. “We are also in talks with EASSy and WACS to extend our network and have multiple layers of redundancy.”
ADSL international bandwidth redundancy: ISPs explain << Comments and views
Loading ...