Cybersmart and SEACOM

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wikus

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I received this email from Cybersmart this afternoon:

Hi

Cybersmart has made a large investment in infrastructure by purchasing its own capacity on
the new Seacom cable system that runs up the East coast of Africa.
http://www.seacom.mu

The reasons for this investment are as follows

1. It reduces our reliance on Telkom for international capacity
2. It gives us cable system redundancy as the existing cable systems run up the west coast
3. It is significantly cheaper than Telkom a savings that we can pass onto you the customer

The Seacom cable officially lands in Mtunzini Durban and is distributed to Midrand via Neotel.
We are the only ISP in South Africa other than Neotel that has negotiated a Seacom
termination in Cape Town. We were very excited to be able to give you better speed at a better price.
Unfortunately after just under a month worth of testing we have had four long outages. Furthermore
the 195ms contractual latency between Cape Town and London is not even close to being achieved; latency
between these points is over the 300ms mark which is completely unacceptable.

The outages have been blamed on Neotels Network from Mtunzini ( http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Telecoms/10136.html)
Whatever the reason for the outages and no matter who is responsible, the service at the moment is certainly not viable
and in good conscience we cannot put our customers onto it no matter what the cost savings might be. The unfortunate fact of
the matter is that the marketing hype around this new cable does not meet reality. We will be moving off Seacom back onto SAT-3
over the weekend and will remain on SAT-3 until such time as the contractual obligations in our contract are met and the network
between Cape Town and Mtunzini becomes stable.

We have maintenance windows between 5 to 7am on the 24th/25th Saturday and Sunday morning to effect this move. There may be short periods of
intermittence during these timeframes while routes are reconfigured and propagated.

Regards

Cybersmart
Click to expand...
 
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Guess we should come back to reality, THIS IS South Africa we're talking about. You can have a fine cable land here, but once it goes inland, it won't work that fine anymore.

I would say Neotel FAIL
 
yip Neotel fail.

I think its getting pretty clear that compared to Neotel Telkom service levels are World Class.....
 
Seacom get cheap and reliable bandwidth to our shores and Neotel turn out to be the weakest link. :mad:
 
Neofail indeed. They literally laid a cable within walking distance of my house and my area still doesn't have coverage (not that that's a bad thing :p)
 
WTF?!?!??!?! What is going to happen with the new packages for next month? I wanted my 4Mb with 5Gb bandwidth.
 
dominic said:
nothing wrong with SEACOM - your other friends are at fault here

amazing how a cable can travel 1000s of km's under the ocean but once it lands ...
Click to expand...

Sorry, you are right, typed without thinking. Notel FAIL.

Or whoever is in charge of the Seacom-Cape Town link.

I highly doubt that this is Cybersmarts fault as they do not operate the cable, they just use the service.

And here I was hoping my cap would increase :(
 
Yeah, I'm disappointed too, but on the bright side, once everything's up and running, we'll have great connectivity, since "We are the only ISP in South Africa other than Neotel that has negotiated a Seacom termination in Cape Town"

I'll say one thing, having used the Webafrica trial - when it works, the latency on Seacom is great!
 
Firstly, WebAfrica is NOT on Seacom bandwidth, they are using SAIX as far as I know. Secondly, and I need to stress this loud and clear, these problems are NOT with Seacom, Seacom works 100%, we have a coupla hundred meg of traffic running live on it and its running flawlessly, BUT, the reason we haven't had the outages is because we do NOT ride anyone elses backhaul from the Landing Station.

With our DFA backhaul into the Landing station, we have had 2 fiber breaks since it went in in June, both outages sub 3 hours, and once we are able we will find redundant routes from the Landing station at a cost we can afford, we will probably do this.

But issues on the actual cable itself? No issues whatsoever.
On the DFA time to repair on the fiber? No issues whatsoever.

Blaim the backhaul... not the cable
 
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Precisely what I thought... and it just compounds my opinion that Neotel are even MORE incompetent than Telkom which is something I thought would never be possible, but they prove it day in and day out.
 
The SEACOM Perspective

First, thank you to the community for the active discussions and the support for SEACOM.

The SEACOM cable has been available 100% of the time since going live with return latency of at worst 195ms from Mtunzini. This latency will drop further by the end of the year as our routing is adjusted.

SEACOM does not offer a bundled product to Cape Town. Although we hope to offer this product some day, today the product purchased by CYBERSMART is from a third party who has bundled national and access transmission to the SEACOM Cable Station in Mtunzini.

Having said this, SEACOM too is frustrated with the conditions in South Africa as the impact on the East African market far exceeds those achieved in South Africa. In light of this, and conscious of our companies stated objectives, we are open to finding the best solutions to reach all customers in South Africa.

We welcome any advice and thank those customers that have come out in our support.

Brian Herlihy
 
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