Southern Suburbs Latency Issues

Thought Id add something here in case we have any readers living in the Southern Suburbs and wondering why their ADSL is so slow. YES you arent the only ones feeling the burn.

Since the rollout of the 10mb lines in the area, a few months back, weve seen some serious instability on the main Wynberg Interchange. So much so that people were ugraded to 10mb, and left without any connectivity for a week or two, me included, until they eventually sorted it out and left me on 6mb. A few people on the same exchange (Clareinch) can work on 10, but for some reason I cant. Anway..

As some of you may or may not know, the Southern Suburbs has the highest ADSL penetration rates in the country, so much so that I would say its more like Double Penetration and Telkoms sphincter cant actually handle the bandwidth. Now telkom has existing infrastructure which has catered for the needs of Cape Town for some time now, and I think that was forgotten or neglected to take into account, that they may have to actually upgrade the network hardware first then do the upgrades. In typical incumbent fashion, the 10mb roll outs went ahead and now we are left in the wake of serious regular packet loss and bottle necking. However, maybe telkom isnt completely to blame here, well maybe they are, but the ISP’s should have done their research before releasing these products of doom.

In conjunction with the 10mb  roll outs, uncapped accounts have become quite popular and because of that, the throughput on our CINX (Cape Town Internet Exchange) has doubled in the last year putting serious pressure on the infrastructure. Combined with double the amount of download bandwidth, its quite clear that a combination of Uncapped downloading and bad infrastructure have left us Southern Suburbians without fast, clean ADSL.

Testing has proved that pinging saix.net between 9am and 11pm is a mess because of the times that people download. You can refer to this graph to get a picture of the totals (http://stats.cinx.net.za/showtotal.php).

There is also a thread on Mybroadband about this issue which is being frequented by the MWEB head of ops and somebody from WA. So weve got some big players who are taking the flack because their services are effected resulting in verbal abuse by some of their clients. So they need to sort out as quickly. (http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php/268237-LATENCY!!!/)