A recent trip to Neotel’s data centre in Midrand gave South Africans their first peak into the future of local internet. Journalists and bigwigs converged to enjoy a taste of the new fibre on which PCFormat can attest to speeds around the 3MB/24Mbps mark on an ad hoc test network. Latency was also lower than initial predictions with a round trip to California taking as little as 200ms. How this will translate to end users is still uncertain as the technical capacity is far higher with almost 1.28Tbps total capacity on the undersea cable.
With Telkom’s decision to triple the capacity of the incumbent SAT-3 cable to 120Gbps in the same week, many experts are predicting a price war sooner rather than later. This decision by Telkom is significant since Seacom have only elected to enable 80Gbps of if the fibre pipe for the time being.
Neotel were Seacom’s official landing partner but unlike SAT3, access is far less restrictive on the new pipe and second tier ISP’s will for the first time have direct access to international data. In an over regulated industry with a long exploited market it is anyone’s guess as to when the real effects of Seacom will become a reality.
Nicholas Boerma
