Surprise surprise

So it turns out that some people have been using the looming spectre of the 2010 Soccer World Cup to help talk up their projects.

Infraco - I'm talking about you!

It's not that surprising, really. What is interesting is the talk of SAT-3 (amusingly and unintentionally further abbreviated as at-3) being upgraded to 320 Gbps. This will at least help Telkom with some extra bandwidth - 120 Gbps was pretty paltry at introduction and now looks downright anemic. Does Telkom dominate the SAT-3 consortium so much that it can just force the upgrade?

Science bandwidth requirements estimate

A recent e-mail from a Meraka engineer working on SANReN:

We know eVLBI would require a 1Gb all the way to Amsterdam, current projections for full SKA is 100GB international capacity, the MeerKAT project will probably require 10GB of bandwidth.

So something like the 'bandwidth glut' of Infraco would definitely be required.

It seems like the only people talking about having too many cables are those with a vested interest in having only a few [competing] cables.