East Africa Fibre Connectivity- Heads up

Wed Aug 5 15:24:07 UTC 2009

You are right the 100Mbps is pure network dynamics. right now we are
adapting a wait and see but your added war story means we have to do more
watching as well

Raymond Macharia

On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 4:52 PM, Fred Baker <fred at cisco.com> wrote:

> That is very much to be expected, if nothing else due to pent-up demand.
> The existing vsat infrastructure tends to be pretty saturated, meaning that
> users experience a lot of loss as well as delay. What if they stop losing
> traffic?
>
> War story: in 1995 I found myself sharing a podium with Phill Gross, who
> was then a VP with MCI. He was more or less apologizing for the behavior of
> his network. They had recently upgraded to a then-new-and-gee-whiz OC-3
> infrastructure, in many places using parallel bandwidth, and were dropping a
> lot - he reported one link to be dropping 20%. So they then upgraded the
> whole thing to OC-12 - and fiber that was OC-3 was replaced with an OC-12.
> They presumed that this would give them 75% overprovisioning at worst. What
> they actually saw was that those links that had been dropping 20% were now
> dropping 4%. TCP observed that it was not getting crunched into the ground,
> and started opening its windows.
>
> The other big issue with satcom is of course delay, and with conversion to
> fiber the delay plummets. That means that where you might have had <mumble>
> connections running at <low> average speed due to RTT, the average
> connection speed for the same session is instantly multiplied by
> <old-RTT>/<new-RTT>. That gives the user time and incentive to click again
> during that same time window - new load.
>
> Price is very important, of course, but I suspect your 100 MBPS is
> explainable by simple network dynamics.
>
>
> On Aug 5, 2009, at 6:13 AM, Raymond Macharia wrote:
>
>  Hello all,in the last two weeks or so providers in East Africa,
>> particularly
>> in Kenya where I am, have been moving from Satellite to Fibre for the
>> internet Back bone connectivity. From where I am I have seen an upsurge of
>> about 100Mbps in the last two days from my users. It would be interesting
>> to
>> know if anyone out there has seen an increase in traffic from this region
>> and by how much. There is more to come as providers are cutting prices and
>> adding bandwidth to their networks.
>>
>> Best Regards
>>
>> Raymond Macharia
>>
>
>