Bandwidth

[Mike Stenson (RIP)]

FEEL ambivalent about the arrival of Seacom. On the one hand, there is excitement surrounding the first east-coast undersea bandwidth cable landing in South Africa.

On the other, it will be some time before the full benefits will be realised and the companies which should be saving South Africa from our ridiculously priced bandwidth have been handed an excuse to milk the SA market for a little while longer.

And that's because, at time of Seacom going live, only one company in South Africa can capitalise on the new international bandwidth.

Everyone else is tied up in Telkom contracts that stretch over the next 12 to 18 months at least, from what I can tell. The incumbent network operator saw Seacom coming and used its grip on the market to secure contracts with major clients to tie them down well beyond Seacom being switched on.

Even Neotel, which says it's at the forefront of connectivity in South Africa, has a lot of work to do on its local network before it can produce the economies of scale that will benefit the South African consumer. You only need to run latency tests on Neotel's network to realise it is woefully far away from running a competitive national network.

But let's not downplay Seacom - it was an ambitious project that achieved its goals ahead of the other five international cable projects scheduled to land in South Africa.

Seacom CEO Brian Herlihy and his team deserve full recognition for not only successfully completing the mammoth project that Seacom was, but for doing so on time and ahead of the competition.

Telkom has market by short and curlies

Credit is also due for doing it in a way that offers the African countries in question full benefit of an open availability model, where the bandwidth the project provides is available to all who can afford it.

The reason South Africans will have to wait to reap the benefits from Seacom has nothing to do with the cable project itself, and everything to do with the incumbent operator's grip on the market and other network providers' inabilities to scale up to demand.

Telkom still has the market by the short and curlies, while everyone else is some way away from fully rolling out national networks, even if Neotel (Tata Africa) is closer to the goal than most.

And in the middle of the South African bandwidth saga is the independent communications authority of South Africa (Icasa) which, instead of getting on with things and introducing the policy changes that our telecommunications market so desperately needs, is beating around the bush.

It is also pandering to leftist loonies, hampering progress by interfering in international telecoms deals and having its top brass plead ignorance when taken to task on the matter.

What Icasa should be doing is focusing on local loop unbundling, spectrum allocation and the implementation of policy that can make a real difference to our market.

One can only hope that the new department of communications, under the leadership of minister Siphiwe Nyanda, will bring about the kind of service delivery the Zuma regime has promised as well as the required pressure to bear on the market.

Before South Africa catches up with the rest of the world in terms of bandwidth availability, several things needs to happen. Telkom's grip on the market must be broken, possibly through unbundling of the local loop, which will allow other telecoms operators to access Telkom infrastructure.

Consumer apathy also to blame

The other operators building out national networks - including Neotel, Vodacom and MTN - must complete their network upgrades and expansions to completely escape interconnect contracts.

Companies in a position to drastically reduce prices must do so. And this is something the market is loath to do, barring the smaller players who have no choice but to compete on price to gain entry.

As it stands, only Neotel is in any position to reduce prices - and it doesn't have to, because no one else can.

And, finally, the South African consumer is to blame for expressing some of the worst apathy in the world. We are ripped off for a number of things in South Africa - branded clothing, electronics, cars - and, yes, bandwidth. But instead of rising up against ridiculous prices, South Africans sit back and take it.

SAT3, which was the only cable connecting SA to the rest of the world until Seacom arrived, is currently underutilised. The cable is not fully lit up - meaning it is not yet delivering its full capacity. Surely if SA had a bandwidth shortage the first step would have been to fully capitalise on existing infrastructure?

But no, it was never necessary. And if we had the ability to bring down prices in the past, and didn't, what makes anyone think we will do so now?

Realistically, South Africans cannot expect cheaper broadband in the next year. It will be another year or two before we are anywhere near prices experienced in the developed world.

We will see minor reductions in the short term, but don't hold your breath for world-class bandwidth - because there is too much money to be made from milking an apathetic South African public for a little while longer. The bandwidth price drop is inevitable, but it ain't here yet.

[Mike Stenson (RIP)]

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[Michael Alexander]

YAHOOOOOO! Thats the same letter I read at work, and if I understand it correctly, all fixed ADSL lines in Namibia are now uncapped...... puts Namibia telecoms way ahead of the SOuth Africans...... I never thought that uncapped ADSL would arrive in Oranjemund...... but here it is... WAY TO GO NAMIBIA TELCOM.....

[Andrew Darné]

ok... so the wireless guys (3G EVDO) are in for an account then outside of bundle...?
Shhh... don't awaken too many sleeping dogs yet... this is Namibia and probs won't be too long before Telecom wack the lid on the fixed line guys! They already have an issue with Skype and other VOIP utilities. They'll be whining that they're losing revenue.

[Michael Alexander]

I don't think that they will cap the ADSL, due to the new broadband cable that Stennie mentioned, there is also another broadband cable due to be connected along the west coast of Africa in the next 24 months..... the idea is to encourage the masses to access the net, and that cannot be achieved by ripping of the folk....

[Mike Stenson (RIP)]

Read the artical again.......says uncapped at a flat rate........what is the flat rate......
The uncapped rate for 3g is R999........what is the uncapped rate now for ASDL............

[Mike Stenson (RIP)]

ACS: 400Gbps from day one
James E-Smith
MyBroadband | 20 November, 2009

The West African Cable System is on track to deliver more bandwidth to SA than all other cables combined

The West African Cable System (WACS) which is due to be completed in 2011, will link South Africa and the United Kingdom. The cable system is a joint venture between Telkom, Neotel, MTN, Vodacom and the state owned Broadband Infraco.

Along its route, the cable will land in numerous countries, including Namibia, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Cape Verde and Portugal are among the planned destinations.

The design capacity of the cable system is set at 3.84Tb/s, with talk of over 5Tb/s being viable in future. This dwarfs other cables such as SAT3 (340Gb/s), SAFE (440Gb/s), SEACOM (1.28Tb/s) and EASSy (1.4Tb/s) - which when combined offer nearly 2.7Tb/s, well under the minimum capacity of WACS.

Speaking at the recent MyBroadband conference, Kobus Stroeder, chairman of the WACS Management Committee, discussed why a high capacity cable was designed, and gave an update on progress of the project.

“The system is a good example of collaboration amongst operators in a single market, and one of the few examples in the world where all major operators have collaborated on a single project,” said Stroeder.

“The [consortium] business model is quite different to that of a privately owned system. Return will be generated from the use of the capacity in the retail sector, and not necessarily just from the wholesale of bandwidth.”

“[WACS] will be equipped for 400Gb/s on day one, and it could potentially be higher. The reason for the capacity is the four fibre pairs, whereas most [systems] have two,” Stroeder explained.

“We have designed the system so that we can have the shortest route, and the lowest latency, from large markets such as Nigeria and South Africa, into Europe with no intermediate landings,” Stroeder continued. There will be a single connection running from South Africa to London.

Right up to the point-of-presence installed in London, the entire system is directly under control of the operator consortium, with no third parties or other systems having an effect between points of interconnect.

“The system contract was signed on the 8th of April. The route survey is completed and the trunk survey is still to be completed. We have started manufacture of equipment – more than 10% of the repeaters have been manufactured,” Stroeder continued.

“Since the conceptual design by all of these operators, they have really illustrated commitment and a single minded focus on their goal – to provide cost effective connectivity between Europe and South Africa, and other African markets,” Stroeder concluded.

[Michael Alexander]

Drooooool!   When ? When? When?   2011..... Aaagh! Toooo far away.... but this is progress....would love to know how much it will cost the private guy at home,,,,