In the last weeks I’ve talked to a few people who were looking at moving their hosting back to South Africa. Their traffic costs in the US are usually about 20 times cheaper than in SA.
I watched this Summit TV interview with Tim today.
Around 4:56 in, the question comes up about moving hosting back to SA. Now, the major reason you would want to do this is to better serve your customers in SA and maybe some patriotic angle about keeping SA money in SA.
I don’t agree that international traffic costs are the main issue. We want cheaper local and inter-metro connectivity. This is where Telkom is still killing us.
Connectivity between Joburg and Cape Town is more expensive than Cape Town to London. Neotel have not done much about it.. in fact they are more expensive than Telkom at the moment (Neolink 4Mbps JHB – CPT @ R72875 pm). Infraco could help.. assuming they only get an ECNS licence (and not ECS). MTN, Neotel and DFA seem to be digging their own national fibre and should complete this before the end of the year.. let’s hope they don’t price it at 5% less than Telkom.
If we can get local connectivity costs right.. make it at least 20 times cheaper, I think it would make sense for more people to host in SA.
My memory of MTN’s press releases at the beginning of this year was that they were talking about a roughly three-year-long process, with the first link (Jhb to Durban) being completed by the end of the year (doubtless to get to SEACOM). So isn’t this rather optimistic?
“MTN, Neotel and DFA seem to be digging their own national fibre and should complete this before the end of the year..”
The whole national bandwidth situation (except for people in Jhb) is pretty depressing.
Hi drs
Yeah, could be. I really just picked up on some informal conversation about that plan. Somebody mentioned they could do CPT-JHB by the end of the year.