Internet: how much is enough?
Internet.
How much is enough?
South Africa seems to be on its own planet when it comes to internet and in the nigh on 5 years I’ve been back, I’ve had to learn….fast from novice to level expert, well I think so.
I spent nearly 12 years in the UK and there I pretty much saw the birth of broadband and it was so accessible that our house in the Western Isles of Scotland was gifted, yes gifted a desktop PC, modem and of course internet with it. As a South African, I couldn’t believe this generosity and of course took full advantage of this amazing resource. I surfed and surfed and surfed and no care in the world about data, what was data anyway?
Well in 2010 that all changed. I was asked the question by the friendly man in the Telkom shop the day I opened my ADSL account, “How much data would you like?” I looked at him with a very puzzled expression on my face and simply replied, quite confidently, “I’d like all of it please”. He laughed. I soon realised I was in a warped Oliver Twist novel with my bowl out in front of the Telkom man, “please Sir, can I have some more”.
I now know how much data I need to do my work, so if I’m asked that question today I’ll have a very different answer. Fact is I don’t really use that much for the work I do. Skype (lots of), emails of course and CRM systems is where the bulk goes, so when we looked at options for Fibre
Bandwidth Bandwidth Bandwidth
Fast forward to 2015 and the dawn of accessible Fibre. So what have I learnt? A few things actually:
- Bandwidth is king
- Find out what your contention ratio is
- Negotiated data bundles = great value
- Have a back up plan in place, even fibre can go dark
We took our time to find the provider that suited our needs best at Cape Town Office and as we don’t have corporate budgets, we had to be very selective. Early on we learnt about a little thing called contention ratios. What’s this you ask? Well that’s (and this is my understanding of it) the minimum bandwidth the provider can guarantee at any one time. We have a 2:1 contention ratio at CTO, both for local and international traffic which works brilliantly and in real applications does the job!
Of course you could work from home and sort out your own Fibre, but be warned … it aint cheap. Costs for a 20Mbps line start at R7,000 + VAT without data and in any currency, that’s a fair amount of money.
Think of it this way – you could rent 3 desks at our office with the 100 Mbps Fibre with free coffee or tea, if that’s your thing, for less than that per month and still have spare change for beer!
Kinda makes sense, right?