With stubbornly high prices and a crippling per-gigabyte business model, South African broadband has struggled to deliver the bandwidth-rich experience enjoyed throughout much of the world. <\/p>\n
For those who can afford it, uncapped ADSL accounts<\/a> have proven popular. Many of these, however, have usage thresholds, heavy shaping and other limitations that often throttle users to sub-broadband speeds. <\/p>\n Despite this, one can achieve high volumes and low per-gigabyte costs – but at a price. The total monthly cost for a 4Mb\/s ADSL line and a suitable uncapped account starts from about R1 800 and upwards. <\/p>\n A large void exists between uncapped accounts and the typical per-gigabyte pricing restraint seen at the low usage end of the ADSL market. The only glimmer in the void is that uniquely South African novelty, local bandwidth. <\/p>\n Large ISPs like Telkom Internet, MWeb and Internet Solutions give away free local bandwidth on their standard packages. For the average user, however, these gifts are elusive; only accessible once capped. Very few take advantage since being capped means being without one’s favourite overseas websites.<\/p>\n Local bandwidth can also be purchased from as little as R4 to R10 per gigabyte, considerably less than international bandwidth. In addition to usenet and local peer-to-peer networks, there is a surprisingly wide range of local content available. This is where traffic splitting enters the stage. <\/p>\n In MyBroadband’s ADSL discussion forum<\/a> few topics are more widely discussed. The principle objective of traffic splitting is maximising one’s broadband experience while minimising the cost. <\/p>\n By running two ADSL accounts concurrently, one can utilize cheaper local bandwidth and ensure that expensive international bandwidth is not “wasted” on local content. Traffic splitting works by introducing a table of local routes, so that traffic to and from local websites is diverted to the local connection. This optimisation can lead to significant savings.<\/p>\n Traffic splitting is not trivial. It requires effort to implement. <\/strong><\/p>\n Various solutions exist, the most popular of which is Route Sentry<\/a>, an application developed by MyBroadband forumite, ant1b0dy. As it requires only a Windows PC and a generic modem\/router running in bridged mode, its main advantage is that just about anyone can achieve traffic splitting using this approach. The only serious disadvantage is that, in a network environment, the solution has to be configured on each machine, making it increasingly unwieldy for larger networks. <\/p>\n