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Neotel: My Views
NeoConnect Prime seems to be a pretty good deal for high-end users but NeoConnect Lite actually seems to be more expensive than ADSL.
Personally, I don't really care about either. I'm much more interested with what we can do with Neotel's national fibre backbone. Neotel installed massive amounts of fibre in George; it's almost shocking how many streets have Neotel manholes running along them. I can all but fantasise at this point of time what we can do with that.
I accept that, in the short term, as far as international access is concerned we're buggered. South Africa is physically separated from first world and Asian countries where bandwidth is flowing in rivers. Over here, we are used to nothing more than a trickle. That we are physically separated is not an excuse, especially not since our government is effectively blocking overseas companies from connecting us in favour of local initiatives that don't even seem to get anywhere.
However, that does not mean we should not be using our local bandwidth as well as possible. Most hosting companies in South Africa don't separate local and international bandwidth costs. Most South Africans tend to host overseas because of the ridiculous bandwidth prices locally. Hosting a site overseas that is mainly of interest to people overseas actually makes some sense but hosting a site that is mainly of local interest actually worsens the bandwidth situation as now locals have to use international links to access the site.
The bottom line is that the best we can do in the short term is to host as much as possible locally; if the overseas interest is good then we will have to mirror.
The start for me to this is Neotel's local backbone. Basically I want servers standing in a data centre that connects right up to Neotel's backbone and allows me to stream high-bandwidth content over their network, cheaply. This is to my benefit as I have an easy, cheap way of distributing my content. It also helps Neotel because if I have good content it adds value to their service, so we all win.
What I really would like to see from Neotel's consumer offerings though is separation of local and international bandwidth, straight from the first day of the month. In other words, let's say you have a 10 GB international cap, you could maybe get a 200 GB local cap. If you download 5 GB locally on the first day of the month, this should count against your 200 GB local cap, not your international cap.
So, Neotel, what do you say? :)
Copyright © 2004-2009 Charl van Niekerk. All articles are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 South Africa licence, unless where otherwise stated.
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