| Rudolph Muller | July 29, 2011 | 3 comments |
National bandwidth costs are currently undoing the benefits of cheaper international bandwidth in South Africa
South Africans rejoiced in July 2009 when SEACOM arrived in South Africa, breaking Telkom’s SAT-3/SAFE monopoly in the international bandwidth market.Savings were slow to filter down to consumers, but towards the end of 2009 ADSL data prices started to plummet. SEACOM also made it possible for MWEB to launch affordable uncapped ADSL packages for the first time in SA.
In July 2010, a year after SEACOM arrived in South Africa, EASSy launched commercial operations in the country. The impact of EASSy was far less significant than SEACOM, but the additional bandwidth and added redundancy is of great value to the country.
With the 5Tbps WACS cable set to become operational in the first half of 2012, South Africa will become awash with international bandwidth. However, another bottleneck is now a stumbling block to further bandwidth and broadband price cuts.
National bandwidth remains expensive and this was one of the reasons why MWEB decided to stop paying for local transit in October 2010.
The problem with national bandwidth costs are clearly illustrated when considering the price of carrying bandwidth to Johannesburg from the SAT-3 landing station.
Internet Solutions’ Derek Wilcocks explains that it currently costs them more to carry bandwidth from the landing station in Melkbosstrand (near Cape Town) to Johannesburg, than from London to the landing station.
The high cost of national bandwidth is clearly undoing much of the benefit of lower international bandwidth rates, but the good news is that there are numerous projects under way to change this situation.
Vodacom, MTN and Neotel have joined forces in rolling out a national fibre project; Broadband Infraco still has plans to fulfill their mandate to bring down national bandwidth costs; and FibreCo is set to start building their planned national fibre network soon.
SEACOM also announced recently that they have invested R100 million in additional South African infrastructure to meet the continuous high growth in demand for broadband services and applications.
The investment includes the purchase of physical optical fibre links from Dark Fibre Africa (DFA) as well as installing the equipment required for SEACOM to manage the network linking KwaZulu Natal’s coast (where the SEACOM marine cable lands) to two redundant Points of Presence (PoPs) in Gauteng.
Initially, 100 Gigabit per second (Gbps) of the fibre will be lit (using current 10Gbps technology) and a further 20 waves are expected to be lit within the next 12 months.
All of these projects should results in far lower national bandwidth rates and far better redundancy – similar to what South Africa experienced over the last two years in terms of international bandwidth.
Africa undersea cables projection - 2013 - Image courtesy Many Possibilities
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