TechCentralTechCentral
    Facebook Twitter YouTube LinkedIn
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn YouTube
    TechCentral TechCentral
    NEWSLETTER
    • News

      E.tv: ‘We know we must vacate broadband spectrum bands’

      29 June 2022

      E-commerce is killing shopping malls – but, curiously, not in South Africa

      29 June 2022

      Eskom warns recovery from strike chaos could take weeks

      29 June 2022

      Eskom offers workers 7% increase: sources

      29 June 2022

      Eskom employees returning to work

      29 June 2022
    • World

      Napster plots crypto comeback

      29 June 2022

      Pictures: Chinese spacecraft acquires images of entire planet of Mars

      29 June 2022

      Arm aims for leg-up in smartphone games with new chip tech

      29 June 2022

      Warnings of a final bitcoin ‘washout’

      29 June 2022

      Sony launches into PC gaming hardware

      29 June 2022
    • In-depth

      The great crypto crash: the fallout, and what happens next

      22 June 2022

      Goodbye, Internet Explorer – you really won’t be missed

      19 June 2022

      Oracle’s database dominance threatened by rise of cloud-first rivals

      13 June 2022

      Everything Apple announced at WWDC – in less than 500 words

      7 June 2022

      Sheryl Sandberg’s ad empire leaves a complicated legacy

      2 June 2022
    • Podcasts

      How your organisation can triage its information security risk

      22 June 2022

      Everything PC S01E06 – ‘Apple Silicon’

      15 June 2022

      The youth might just save us

      15 June 2022

      Everything PC S01E05 – ‘Nvidia: The Green Goblin’

      8 June 2022

      Everything PC S01E04 – ‘The story of Intel – part 2’

      1 June 2022
    • Opinion

      Has South Africa’s advertising industry lost its way?

      21 June 2022

      Rob Lith: What Icasa’s spectrum auction means for SA companies

      13 June 2022

      A proposed solution to crypto’s stablecoin problem

      19 May 2022

      From spectrum to roads, why fixing SA’s problems is an uphill battle

      19 April 2022

      How AI is being deployed in the fight against cybercriminals

      8 April 2022
    • Company Hubs
      • 1-grid
      • Altron Document Solutions
      • Amplitude
      • Atvance Intellect
      • Axiz
      • BOATech
      • CallMiner
      • Digital Generation
      • E4
      • ESET
      • Euphoria Telecom
      • IBM
      • Kyocera Document Solutions
      • Microsoft
      • Nutanix
      • One Trust
      • Pinnacle
      • Skybox Security
      • SkyWire
      • Tarsus on Demand
      • Videri Digital
      • Zendesk
    • Sections
      • Banking
      • Broadcasting and Media
      • Cloud computing
      • Consumer electronics
      • Cryptocurrencies
      • Education and skills
      • Energy
      • Fintech
      • Information security
      • Internet and connectivity
      • Internet of Things
      • Investment
      • IT services
      • Motoring and transport
      • Public sector
      • Science
      • Social media
      • Talent and leadership
      • Telecoms
    • Advertise
    TechCentralTechCentral
    Home»In-depth»What Wacs really means for SA consumers

    What Wacs really means for SA consumers

    In-depth By Editor13 April 2012
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn WhatsApp Telegram Email
    The Wacs cable coming ashore in 2011 north of Cape Town (image: Aki Anastasiou)

    Next month, the gigantic West African Cable System (Wacs) will come online, bringing around 400Gbit/s of submarine fibre capacity to SA at launch. But what does this increase in capacity mean for SA consumers and Internet service providers?

    Sean Nourse, executive for connectivity at Internet Solutions, says that although the effects of Wacs may not be felt by consumers in the short term, they most certainly will be felt in the longer term.

    “There’s enough capacity coming into SA already; the bottleneck is on national backhaul and the last mile [into homes]. The effect on the consumer all has to do with how much capacity Internet service providers choose to take on Wacs, as they’re already invested elsewhere,” he says.

    Nourse says consumers will benefit insofar as service providers having another option for resilience and redundancy should mean better service quality. “But consumers won’t get better speeds for now and, as it’s a net new cost for service providers, you might not see prices fall immediately.”

    Until consumers can actually utilise more of the available capacity, Nourse says the cost benefit won’t reach them. “Seacom [along the east coast] made a massive difference in 2009 because there was a need for capacity then, but even though the next cable Eassy was larger the capacity couldn’t be utilised and it didn’t make nearly as much of a difference.”

    Lex van Wyk

    One of the biggest local investors in Wacs is mobile operator MTN. Karel Pienaar, head of the group’s SA business, says the huge excess of capacity supply will drive the international component of data costs down. “It will eventually benefit consumers in terms of pricing, but also in terms of experience.”

    He says both resilience and quality of service are destined to improve and price reductions will be felt first at the corporate level. “We do a lot of provisioning of international corporate bandwidth and wholesale to other operators and they are going to see benefits.”

    Pienaar says it will take a couple of months for the effects to be felt and that corporate clients can expect to see pricing changes from around July. He says MTN is already noticing some price reductions in large deals that are still being negotiated.

    He says the real bottleneck is in allowing consumers to make use of the added capacity. MTN, he says, is desperate for access to more spectrum that would allow it to roll out commercial networks using next-generation broadband technology.

    “Until spectrum scarcity is removed, price changes will be limited,” he says. He adds data demand is growing and MTN has seen a 20%-30% increase in data traffic this quarter. “From one petabyte at the end of last year, we’re now up to 1,3PB in this quarter.”

    Lex van Wyk, MD of data centre company Teraco, shares the view that the benefits of Wacs won’t be felt by consumers immediately. Teraco will offer direct access to Wacs bandwidth from its data centre facilities.

    Van Wyk agrees that the real bottleneck is in last-mile infrastructure rather than in international bandwidth.

    He also expects local content storage and distribution to grow. “Video streaming can now be cached in SA. The last mile is going to be a problem for a while to come, but lots of people are trenching fibre and the spectrum licensing process is making progress, but until that’s done, accessing the capacity is going to be difficult.”  — (c) 2012 NewsCentral Media

    Internet Solutions Karel Pienaar Lex van Wyk MTN Seacom Teraco Wacs
    Share. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn WhatsApp Telegram Email
    Previous ArticleHigh-sea hijinks with Aardman’s Pirates!
    Next Article Unregistered motorists to pay more in e-tolls

    Related Posts

    The great crypto crash: the fallout, and what happens next

    22 June 2022

    MTN to deploy 5G in more regions in South Africa

    21 June 2022

    Goodbye, Internet Explorer – you really won’t be missed

    19 June 2022
    Add A Comment

    Comments are closed.

    Promoted

    Think herding cats is tricky? Try herding a cloud

    29 June 2022

    How your business can help hybrid workers effectively

    28 June 2022

    Hands off our satellite spectrum!

    27 June 2022
    Opinion

    Has South Africa’s advertising industry lost its way?

    21 June 2022

    Rob Lith: What Icasa’s spectrum auction means for SA companies

    13 June 2022

    A proposed solution to crypto’s stablecoin problem

    19 May 2022

    Subscribe to Updates

    Get the best South African technology news and analysis delivered to your e-mail inbox every morning.

    © 2009 - 2022 NewsCentral Media

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.