{"id":364094,"date":"2020-08-18T12:55:19","date_gmt":"2020-08-18T10:55:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=364094"},"modified":"2020-08-18T12:56:44","modified_gmt":"2020-08-18T10:56:44","slug":"why-uncapped-wireless-internet-always-breaks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/broadband\/364094-why-uncapped-wireless-internet-always-breaks.html","title":{"rendered":"Why uncapped wireless Internet always breaks"},"content":{"rendered":"

The MyBroadband South African ISP rankings for July 2020<\/strong><\/a> recently showed that Rain has replaced Telkom as the lowest-ranked Internet service provider (ISP) in the country.<\/p>\n

Subscribers using Rain’s uncapped LTE and 5G services continue to complain about unreliable network performance, saying that at certain times of day they struggle to use the Internet at all.<\/p>\n

Uncapped wireless broadband services in South Africa have repeatedly run into this challenge.<\/p>\n

When the service first launches and the network is empty, subscribers are extremely pleased with their purchase.<\/p>\n

However, as more subscribers buy the service and climb onto the network, performance degrades. In the worst cases, the network becomes unusably slow.<\/p>\n

The same thing happened to Telkom uncapped LTE in 2016<\/strong><\/a>, and before that to Sentech MyWireless in 2009.<\/p>\n

Sentech MyWireless<\/h3>\n

Sentech launched its MyWireless broadband service in 2004, offering an uncapped alternative to the prescribed 3GB cap Telkom had on DSL.<\/p>\n

MyWireless enjoyed a strong uptake, but poor service levels dogged the broadband provider.<\/p>\n

This resulted in consumer backlash that damaged the reputation of the company and product, something which Sentech never recovered from.<\/p>\n

Sentech MyWireless was discontinued<\/a><\/strong> on 30 November 2009.<\/p>\n

Telkom uncapped LTE<\/h3>\n

Telkom offered its uncapped LTE service to customers who connected via a specific base station. After several trials, the company expanded the offer nationally<\/strong><\/a> in December 2015.<\/p>\n

In September 2016, Telkom started throttling the connections of subscribers who consumed more than 185GB in a month to 4Mbps. When you exceeded 250GB of usage, connections were throttled to 256kbps.<\/p>\n

Following a backlash on social media, Telkom revised its throttling policy and said that it would throttle subscribers in stages<\/strong><\/a> based on their monthly usage.<\/p>\n

Bandwidth on wireless vs fibre<\/h3>\n

The reason uncapped wireless services will inevitably suffer from performance problems is simple: spectrum is limited, while demand for data constantly grows.<\/p>\n

Spectrum is the raw capacity available to a network. In wireless networks, this is measured on megahertz (MHz) while on fibre networks it is measured in nanometers (nm).<\/p>\n

It is possible to convert between MHz and nanometers using equations such as “frequency = speed of light \u00f7 wavelength”. Frequency is measured in hertz, the speed of light in meters per second, and the wavelength in meters.<\/p>\n

The amount of raw capacity available in a strand of fibre cable is at least 100,000 times greater than in any one of South Africa’s wireless networks.<\/p>\n

To illustrate this, we compared the amount of spectrum currently assigned to network operators ins South Africa and compared it to the amount of raw bandwidth available in commonly-used wavelengths of light in fibre.<\/p>\n

The bands of light used in our calculations were taken from the website of the Fibre Optic Association<\/a><\/strong> (FOA).<\/p>\n

The O-band runs from wavelengths of 1,260nm to 1,360nm, which translates to around 17.5 terahertz (17,500,000 MHz) of raw capacity.<\/p>\n

Similarly, the dense wavelength division multiplexing bands (C-band and L-band) together have 11.4THz of bandwidth.<\/p>\n

It should be noted that this is a conservative estimate of the amount of bandwidth available in fibre, as it only looks at certain bands of light.<\/p>\n

The FOA states<\/a><\/strong> that a single-mode fibre has roughly 100THz of bandwidth in total.<\/p>\n

The following table shows how the amount of raw network capacity on South Africa’s wireless networks compare to that of the fibre O-band.<\/p>\n

\n
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Network<\/th>\nTotal capacity<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
Vodacom<\/td>\n81MHz<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
MTN<\/td>\n86MHz<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Cell C<\/td>\n76MHz<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Telkom<\/td>\n162MHz<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Liquid Telecom<\/td>\n90MHz<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Rain<\/td>\n191MHz<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Fibre (O-band)<\/td>\n17,500,000MHz<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Now read: These numbers show why Vodacom and MTN desperately need more spectrum<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Compared to fibre broadband, the amount of bandwidth available on wireless networks is a drop in the ocean.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":215664,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[221,245,21805,66208,35,251,4490],"class_list":["post-364094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-broadband","tag-bandwidth","tag-broadband-spectrum","tag-fibre-broadband","tag-fibre-optic-association-foa","tag-headline","tag-radio-frequency-spectrum","tag-spectrum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364094"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364094"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364094\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":364220,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364094\/revisions\/364220"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}