According to the latest Rhodes IT minutes, they expect to increase their bandwidth radically:
4.5 Mbps of international bandwidth x a 35 fold increase in ... Internet bandwidth yields 155 Mbps - an OC3. In 2008! At least South Africa isn't too far behind the times ;)
Does this mean UCT will be getting a similar capacity, or something a little faster? Since we'll be near one of the cores of SANREN, hopefully things will be a bit better.
Also, ITWeb thinks SANREN will be a 10 Gbps network (presumably per link, not in aggregate). Note also the proximity to JINX - that should offload some of the transit requirements to direct peering. Also, the projected operational date is end 2008! (a bit earlier than previously thought, and also overlapping with GEN3's mandate with TENET).
Also also, the Infraco weirdness with cabling up the west coast to Europe and South America should matter a little less with the redundant path on SEACOM that TENET has purchased the rights to use.
So, perhaps academic and high speed networking in South Africa has a bright future after all?
4 comments:
SANReN will be a 10Gbps network. UCT, CHPC ,UWC etc will get their 10Gbps connections to the Cape Town hub some time next year.
The 10Gbps link to Europe is scheduled for mid-2009. (5Gbps transit + peering)
Stefano,
That 10 Gbps link to Europe is presumably the SEACOM IRU that was recently purchased.
I would be very impressed if the total transit purchased *was* 5 Gbps. TENET's current overseas transit is about 300 Mbps AFAIK.
Also, considering the co-location of the JHB hub near JINX, can we assume decent local peering. Let's hope that a long-term peering arrangement is part of the GEN3 agreement with IS. Neotel has indicated (without substantive backup) that they will peer/inter-connect with all local players.
Yes, that's the one.
Transit in Europe isn't too expensive, esp. as you got to the large scale.
Peering with the European NRENs is free for TENET, and one can expect quite a lot of data will be going over those links. If they find 5Gbps of transit isn't enough, I'm sure it'll increase, getting to London is the hard part at the moment...
While I'm not going to comment on the SANReN side of the network at this point, some things to clarify about the peering to the GEN3/SANReN network.
The JINX peering will be a gigabit circuit.
There is also an agreement to peer with Internet Solutions in both Cape Town and Johannesburg, and these circuits are 10gigabit each in size.
The transit on the seacom cable, and how much will be purchased is up for debate, transit in Europe is cheap, but in my opinion, the general policy is, if you can peer, peer, so dependent on how much traffic flows to the peers will depend on how much transit actually needs to be purchased.
TENET's policy on peering both nationally and internationally is a completely open one. Basically, if there is a legitimate legal entity with live IP space and a live ASN, we are prepared to peer. Obviously where there are costs involved in peering circuits, those would have to be negotiated dependent on various factors.
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