On Friday 30 December 2005 01:30, McTim wrote:

> comments inline in color, apologies to those of yoou
> using Pine, etc ;-):

I can't see color :). But on the issue:

KDN has been working on connecting MBA to NBO for a long 
time now. However, like McTim says, this doesn't help any 
if the quality of the connection is confined within the 
borders. UTL and MTN-UG also have an internal fibre 
network, connecting their infrastructure within .ug, but 
that doesn't mean anything yet with regard to true 
Internet speeds. In .zw, we hook our PoP's across the 
country back to HRE over fibre. The reporter was a little 
anxious.

On a well engineered network, there wouldn't be that much 
of a difference between copper and fibre until you need 
speeds in excess of 50Mbps (give or take). So unless 
Telkom Kenya's infrastructure is very congested (part of 
which I'm sure is already on fibre)... that said, it 
should make a huge difference for ISP's with PoP's in 
both towns, in terms of readily available capacity and 
reduced line rental costs, especially now that VoIP is no 
longer a "grey" service in .ke anymore.

The author isn't being truthful about the "number of 
circuits required for a video feed", more importantly, a 
video feed over IP. It's all in the codecs. Besides, 
having a fibre network doesn't mean you can easily 
upgrade an STM-1 to an STM-4 backbone - fibre is just 
part of the puzzle, the boxes/muxes at both ends really 
count. And those aren't cheap, by any means.

And ISP's don't need to "get their equipment configured to 
handle the new load", if an ISP has been renting 5Mbps of 
bandwidth between NBO and MBA, the router he was using 
for that connection doesn't care whether it's coming in 
on fibre, copper, a shoe lace or safety pin. Bandwidth is 
bandwidth, once the equipment is in place. So Cisco 
shouldn't be planning on sending down any GSR's, 
6500's/7600's or CRS-1's, as the author might suspect.

What this fibre will really do, in the immediate, is 
increase capacity for local content if there was any 
congestion in the first place. Until it is interconnected 
to the undersea cable, there won't be that much 
improvement in international web access.

Mark.

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