How much bandwidth do local Universities have?
Broadband connections have become commonplace in most first world countries, with residential connection speeds typically ranging between a few Mbps and 1 Gbps.
Local broadband connections typically have maximum speeds of around 4 Mbps in the case of ADSL and slightly slower speeds in the case of Vodacom and MTN’s HSDPA offerings.
These speeds are considered slow when compared to high speed broadband connections in European or Asian countries, but they are blistering fast when compared to what University lecturers and students have to be content with.
Recent reports shed some light on the bandwidth problems facing Universities in South Africa, but how much bandwidth do they have? Here is a run down.
How much local bandwidth do they have?
The University of Pretoria has a 5 000 Kbps national connection and 10 Mbps of international bandwidth. The University of Johannesburg has only 3 072 Kbps of national connectivity and a 8 656 Kbps international connection.
WITS University in Johannesburg has a 5 328 Kbps national connection and 16 576 Kbps international while Rhodes University in Grahamstown must make do with 3 112 Kbps of national bandwidth and 7 736 Kbps of international connectivity.
The University of Cape Town’s local connection of 6 592 Kbps and the University of Stellenbosch’s 8 032 Kbps are faster than most other local Universities, but still very slow when compared with international standards. They have international connections of 19 200 Kbps and 15 944 Kbps respectively.
While this is guaranteed local and international bandwidth, the peak speeds serving the full University – thousands of lecturers and students – are typically only a few times more than what a 4 Mbps ADSL user experiences during un-congested periods.
Unsurprisingly students and lecturers are complaining that these slow speeds make Internet based research and work virtually impossible and may even create a negative sentiment towards the Internet as a research tool.
South African and African Universities suffering
According to Steve Song from the International Development Research centre “the average university in Africa has the same aggregate bandwidth as a single home user in North America or Europe.”
Song further points out that the average African university pays more than 50 times for this bandwidth than their counterparts in Europe or North America do for much more capacity.
According to Song technological, commercial, and political issues are to blame for the dismal state of bandwidth at African Universities and he blames telecom policy reform as one of the critical barriers to access to ICTs in Africa.
Hope
There is however hope on the horizon for South African universities in the form of the South African Research Network (SANReN) which received R 95-million in funding to provide low-cost broadband links to the local academic community.
SANReN aims to interconnect all South African research institutions to similar institutions elsewhere in the world in an effort to reduce the cost of connecting to the Internet.
SEACOM also recently announced that it will – in partnership with TENET – reduce the cost of international bandwidth to Universities and Research Institutions in South Africa by 5 000%.
It will provide via TENET 40 universities, education and research institutions in South Africa with 50 times more bandwidth than what they currently have.
Some reports further suggest that the much anticipated TENET third generation communications network for academic research and collaboration (Gen3) has been in testing phase at some Universities, something which will add multiple Mbps to the institutions’ bandwidth capacity.
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