Under Da Sea: SEACOM, EASSy and other submarines

Network problem solving and tweaks
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Re: SEACOM Construction Finished!

Post by RuadRauFlessa »

WiK1d wrote:Yeah, R299 to R239 is a HUGE drop.
Well yeah if you sit with like a 8Gb cap like me cuz you are permanently connected to some kind of VPN and working through remote desktops. That 20% makes a big diff to your budget.
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Re: SEACOM Construction Finished!

Post by Sojourn »

I am voting the Seacom farce the biggest let-down since Cope.
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Re: SEACOM Construction Finished!

Post by DarkStar »

Well, there is one ISP that's cheaper than the competition.

G-Connect:
https://gconnect.wirelessg.co.za/ADSLPage.aspx


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Re: SEACOM Construction Finished!

Post by Synthesis »

DarkStar wrote:G-Connect:
So what they going to call their wifi-hotspots? G-Spot :lol:

Prices aren't bad for ADSL but if my calculations are correct, 3G is pretty expensive compared to competition.

As per G-connects normal day rates:
I pay R189 per 500MB for vodacom (38c p/Mb)
According to G-Connect I would pay R310 for 500MB (62c p/Mb)

ADSL though works out to R49 per 1Gb. I pay R55 per 1Gb. There is cheaper though, I just like my ISP and won't change.
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Re: SEACOM Construction Finished!

Post by Stuart »

MyBB wrote:SEACOM reveals bandwidth utilization

During the recent MyBroadband conference Suveer Ramdhani from SEACOM described their business strategy by saying: “It’s quite simple – we took 600-million dollars, threw it in the ocean, and said ‘we need this money back in five years.’ Whatever comes after that is profit. We expected higher market share, but it didn’t quite come through that way.”

Ramdhani revealed that of the full SEACOM design capacity of 1.28Tbps, ten wavelengths have been lit, supplying 100Gbps of bandwidth.

A common complaint is that the anticipated price decreases brought about by the arrival of SEACOM have to a large extent not been realised. There have also been complaints that SEACOM bandwidth has been slow to filter through to consumers.

Ramdhani attributes this to the bottleneck issues surrounding national backhaul systems. “The limiting factor is backhaul. There are those on the consumer side that want bandwidth, and there is us on the undersea side that want to give it – we just can’t seem to connect.”

“It’s kind of disappointing. We don’t have direct control over the retail market. I think everyone wanted to let SEACOM prove itself in the market – nobody wanted to make the first move. After a few months we saw [price] reductions in the market.” Ramdhani said that these reductions have generally not come from Tier 1 SEACOM clients, but from those who have bought from their Tier 1 clients.

“The people who are willing to reduce prices in the market don’t necessarily have their own access network. It really comes down to our channels to the market. The big boys that have [direct] access to customers, and have access to the national [backhaul], need to start dropping their prices as well,” he explained.

“Whilst there is some competition in the national leg, with [Broadband] Infraco and Neotel coming online, there’s a lot of capital being pumped in only [recently], and the price reductions that come with that national backhaul will only [emerge] a few years later,” said Ramdhani.

“The other major point is the access network,” he continued. “Even if you do solve national backhaul bottlenecks, how do you actually get to the consumer in his house or office? Local loop unbundling is still many years away.”

“These issues need to be addressed before consumers really begin to see the benefits of the cable initiatives,” said Ramdhani.

Undersea competition

The operator consortium of Telkom, Vodacom, Broadband Infraco, Neotel and MTN are in the process of implementing their own undersea cable, the West African Cable System (WACS) with a design capacity of over 5Tbps. They made their agreement official on 8 April 2009, just as SEACOM was nearing the Durban coast.

The consortium members will own and have direct access to a large amount of bandwidth over the cable, and hopefully this will spark aggressive pricing competition in the market. Ramdhani discussed the impact this may have on SEACOMs business.

“We are concerned that the operators have chosen to do this. SEACOM being a private open access initiative, it really encourages as many operators [as possible] to purchase from us and access our [points-of-presence]. With operators building their own systems and bringing their own capacity directly to the market, it leaves us with fewer channels to which to market,” said Ramdhani.

Apart from SEACOM and WACS, there is the established undersea cable system SAT-3/SAFE and EASSy – set to arrive in 2010 – which will serve the international bandwidth needs of local companies.
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Re: SEACOM Construction Finished!

Post by Prime »

Stuart wrote:
MyBB wrote:SEACOM reveals bandwidth utilization

During the recent MyBroadband conference Suveer Ramdhani from SEACOM described their business strategy by saying: “It’s quite simple – we took 600-million dollars, threw it in the ocean, and said ‘we need this money back in five years.’ Whatever comes after that is profit. We expected higher market share, but it didn’t quite come through that way.”

Ramdhani revealed that of the full SEACOM design capacity of 1.28Tbps, ten wavelengths have been lit, supplying 100Gbps of bandwidth.

A common complaint is that the anticipated price decreases brought about by the arrival of SEACOM have to a large extent not been realised. There have also been complaints that SEACOM bandwidth has been slow to filter through to consumers.

Ramdhani attributes this to the bottleneck issues surrounding national backhaul systems. “The limiting factor is backhaul. There are those on the consumer side that want bandwidth, and there is us on the undersea side that want to give it – we just can’t seem to connect.”

“It’s kind of disappointing. We don’t have direct control over the retail market. I think everyone wanted to let SEACOM prove itself in the market – nobody wanted to make the first move. After a few months we saw [price] reductions in the market.” Ramdhani said that these reductions have generally not come from Tier 1 SEACOM clients, but from those who have bought from their Tier 1 clients.

“The people who are willing to reduce prices in the market don’t necessarily have their own access network. It really comes down to our channels to the market. The big boys that have [direct] access to customers, and have access to the national [backhaul], need to start dropping their prices as well,” he explained.

“Whilst there is some competition in the national leg, with [Broadband] Infraco and Neotel coming online, there’s a lot of capital being pumped in only [recently], and the price reductions that come with that national backhaul will only [emerge] a few years later,” said Ramdhani.

“The other major point is the access network,” he continued. “Even if you do solve national backhaul bottlenecks, how do you actually get to the consumer in his house or office? Local loop unbundling is still many years away.”

“These issues need to be addressed before consumers really begin to see the benefits of the cable initiatives,” said Ramdhani.

Undersea competition

The operator consortium of Telkom, Vodacom, Broadband Infraco, Neotel and MTN are in the process of implementing their own undersea cable, the West African Cable System (WACS) with a design capacity of over 5Tbps. They made their agreement official on 8 April 2009, just as SEACOM was nearing the Durban coast.

The consortium members will own and have direct access to a large amount of bandwidth over the cable, and hopefully this will spark aggressive pricing competition in the market. Ramdhani discussed the impact this may have on SEACOMs business.

“We are concerned that the operators have chosen to do this. SEACOM being a private open access initiative, it really encourages as many operators [as possible] to purchase from us and access our [points-of-presence]. With operators building their own systems and bringing their own capacity directly to the market, it leaves us with fewer channels to which to market,” said Ramdhani.

Apart from SEACOM and WACS, there is the established undersea cable system SAT-3/SAFE and EASSy – set to arrive in 2010 – which will serve the international bandwidth needs of local companies.
so what about the mad price slashing going on at the moment, because unless I missed it, I don't see mention in the article. he talks about the future. :?
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SEACOM still down

Post by Anthro »

Many ISPs suffer with international bandwidth constraints as SEACOM maintenance takes longer than expected

SEACOM last week said that it experienced a brief interruption in its network on 14 April 2010 as a result of a fault on the Mediterranean section of the SEA-ME-WE 4 submarine cable system, which SEACOM currently utilizes to connect to London.

SEA-ME-WE 4, which stretches from South East Asia to Europe via the Indian Sub-Continent and Middle East, was scheduled to undergo repairs on Saturday 24 April 2010 to fix the affected fibre pair in the Mediterranean Sea.

According to SEACOM this process is carried out by a repair ship which has been deployed to the location of the fault where it will pick up the cable, cut it and bring it onboard to undergo the repair on the optic fibre before the cable is placed back in the water. SEACOM said that this will result in the power being shut down on the cable for the duration of the repair.

“Whilst the disruptive portion of the repair process is expected to be minimal, the precise chronology and actual duration is unpredictable due to exogenous factors such as weather conditions,” SEACOM said.

This process however took longer than expected, and reports from this morning suggest that SEACOM is still down.

According to an Openweb network notice the SEACOM international cable is still down for maintenance. “This is affecting most of our users except for our Premium Vodacom Business and Premium IS users,” the Openweb notice said.

An Afrihost notice from 10:00 today says that the SEACOM cable is currently offline for maintenance. “There is currently no expected time of resolution and we will update this status page as we get updates,” said Afrihost.

Most ISPs currently re-route international traffic over SAT-3, but international speeds have been negatively affected as their SAT-3 capacity, typically only used for redundancy purposes, is significantly less than their SEACOM capacity.
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Re: SEACOM Construction Finished!

Post by Stuart »

Mweb advised this morning that repairs are expected to finish tomorrow sometime only, so international my be a problem for many till then. Of course, this is somewhat irrelevant, because users on Seacom ISPs won't be able to read this till its up anyway. :lol:

I am currently on an Axxess prepaid (on a SAIX backbone) and have no international issues.
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Re: SEACOM Construction Finished!

Post by WiK1d »

What are the MWeb uncapped options based on? Mine has been very slow this morning, so I switched over the my backup WA account and it's flying.
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Re: SEACOM Construction Finished!

Post by Stuart »

WiK1d wrote:What are the MWeb uncapped options based on? Mine has been very slow this morning, so I switched over the my backup WA account and it's flying.
Yep, Mweb is on Seacom, WA is not.
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Re: SEACOM Construction Finished!

Post by KillerByte »

MWEB are on SEACOM but have redundant backup on the SAT-3 cable system.
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Re: SEACOM Construction Finished!

Post by Stuart »

KillerByte wrote:MWEB are on SEACOM but have redundant backup on the SAT-3 cable system.
Indeed. That's why it's SLOW instead of completely DEAD. From MyBB . . .
Mweb Ops wrote:We’ve been notified by Seacom that due to adverse weather conditions the repairs to the undersea cable are going to take longer than originally expected. The work will only be completed some time tomorrow (27th of April). Our alternative international bandwidth is quite congested so we are shaping heavily on things like peer-to-peer. Thank you for your continued patience.

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Re: SEACOM Construction Finished!

Post by KillerByte »

I can assure you that the current p2p shaping is not killing my 384k line too badly. Noticing a 50% drop in max speeds but I did see it peak last night to full speed.
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Re: SEACOM Construction Finished!

Post by Anthro »

My torrents on a 4mb are going at 30.9 Kb/s Webafrica IS account.
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Re: SEACOM Construction Finished!

Post by senile »

Why do people always complain about their torrents? What on earth could be so important that you need to torrent 24/7
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Re: SEACOM Construction Finished!

Post by Anthro »

We use torrents to see if shaping is in place..
Well, at this present moment I am trying to complete one of my anime series, missing a few episodes.
And it's crawling.. so I am impatient
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Re: SEACOM Construction Finished!

Post by senile »

Anthro wrote:We use torrents to see if shaping is in place..
Well, at this present moment I am trying to complete one of my anime series, missing a few episodes.
And it's crawling.. so I am impatient
For the sake of testing if shaping is in place, any suggestions as to where should I download anime from?
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Re: SEACOM Construction Finished!

Post by GreyWolf »

JUST FREAKIN GROOVY!
It's getting quite ridiculous. Not a month goes by that we don't have issues.
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Re: SEACOM Construction Finished!

Post by Stuart »

Ja, it's turned out to be a huge disappointment, hasn't it?
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Re: SEACOM Construction Finished!

Post by KALSTER »

The question is: How and WHY did it fail?
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Re: SEACOM Construction Finished!

Post by Stuart »

KALSTER wrote:The question is: How and WHY did it fail?
Repeatedly?
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Re: SEACOM Construction Finished!

Post by Koko_Lion »

Hope the part is still under warranty
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Re: SEACOM Construction Finished!

Post by KALSTER »

Stuart wrote:
KALSTER wrote:The question is: How and WHY did it fail?
Repeatedly?
Yeah. Is it design related? Bad luck? Substandard materials? Substandard engineering practices? Essentially: Who do we string up?
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Re: SEACOM Construction Finished!

Post by Stuart »

To some degree we surely have to string up our various ISPs who quickly bought into Seacom, seemingly with no redundancy. This shouldn't let Seacom off the hook completely, far from it, but the fact that these breaks are affecting South African Internet users so widely is cause for concern. Webafrica, who evidently did not buy into the cheap bandwidth offered by Seacom, seem to be immune to this malady. I'm not sure how many other ISPs out there are.
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Re: SEACOM Construction Finished!

Post by rustypup »

seacom would be effective if it had a hope of hitting its business plan. until someone burns telkom at the stake, this will not happen.

maintenance costs - and when you're running at <10% capacity because of the government's silent support of their pot-o-gold monopoly, there's a bit of a revenue hole...
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