The Road to Next Generation Broadband

Dr Angus Hay

Which road?

• What we have

– 100% mobile voice penetration

– 2% broadband penetration (10% access the Internet)

– Some 3G users (the same people who have broadband)*

• What we want

– Cheap broadband for all (one size fits all?)

• What we need

– High-end wireline fibre broadband in cities

– Affordable 3G wireless everywhere else

– Lower cost voice services for everyone

* Source: World Wide Worx

The Internet

• Around 30000 unique BGP4 Autonomous Systems• More than 5 Exabytes of traffic carried monthly• 680 million host computers• 1.5 billion unique users globally• 444 million (fixed line) broadband connections• 5 million users in South Africa• “IP over everything & everything over IP”

Tier 1 Internet in South Africa

Latencies to destinations globally are minimised by using shortest fibre routes to create mesh network

West Africa Cable System (WACS)

Unique competitive consortium:

Neotel/Tata, Telkom, Vodacom, MTN,

Infraco, C&W, PTC, Telecom Namibia,

Angola Telecom, Sotelco, Togo Telecom

Landings in South Africa, Namibia,

Angola, DRC, Congo Brazzaville,

Cameroon, Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Cote

d’Ivoire, Cape Verde, Canary Islands,

Portugal, United Kingdom

Minimum 5.12 Tbps design capacity

Total project cost: $600m

Alcatel-Lucent selected as supplier

C&MA, Supply Contract 8 April 2009

Ready For Commercial Service: 2011

Information from WACS Press Release

WACS

Challenges

Photos: ld13 , Neotel

Permissions

Spectrum

Spectrum white space

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BLOEMFONTEIN

PRETORIA

PORT ELIZABETH

DURBAN

CAPE TOWN

JOHANNESBURG

POLOKWANE

NELSPRUIT

WITBANK

RICHARDS BAY

KIMBERLEY

George

Umtata

Bisho

Welkom

Sasolburg

Phalaborwa

Ermelo

Bethlehem

ZIMBABWE

MOZAMBIQUE

SWAZILAND

BOTSWANA

NAMIBIA

LESOTHO PIETERMARITZBURG

EAST LONDON

Ladysmith

Infrastructure sharing

• Submarine optical fibre cable systems

– Unincorporated joint ventures

• Terrestrial optical fibre networks

– Various co-build approaches

• Fixed access networks

– Local Loop Unbundling?

• Mobile networks

– Site sharing

– RAN sharing

– Roaming

Policy for infrastructure

• Public vs Private Investment– Government to move from supply side to demand side

– Operators require incentives to deploy new infrastructure

– Public players likely to undermine private investment

– Simplify permitting, ensure access to radio spectrum

• Urban-Rural Divide– Fundamental difference between urban and rural

– Wireless for rural access, fibre for urban broadband

• Urbanisation vs Rural Development– 40% of Africa’s population is already urbanised

– 65% of South Africa’s population is urban, growing 1% per annum

The changing world of broadband

• Broadband 2.0– Higher bandwidth, low contention ratio

– Symmetrical access and Quality of Service

– High-definition video speeds (20+ Mbps)

– Multiple sources of content, peer-to-peer

• Two worlds of broadband– Wireless for personal broadband access

– Optical fibre for fixed Broadband 2.0 access

– Copper access becoming a legacy technology

• The future of SA Broadband lies in Fibre to the Building / Home

• Broadband is evolving rapidly– Applications, especially streamed media, drive bandwidth requirements

– Technology ensures that the cost of bandwidth will decline over time

Fibre Broadband

• Speed: >10 Mbps, Uncapped, Unshaped

• Symmetrical up/down, low contention ratio

• High Availability: Dual fibre feed to building

• Flexibility: Software upgrade/downgrade

• Managed Customer Premises Equipment

• Simple integration into customer LAN

• Multiline and single line voice service (VoIP)

• Why Fibre Broadband?

• True Broadband performance, world class network

• One provider accountable for entire service

• Immune to lightning, rain, corrosion, copper theft

The future of broadband wireless

• Network architecture– Uncapped wireless as primary broadband

access puts pressure on spectrum and backhaul

– Deep backhaul and high site density required

– Heavy core evolution vs lean pure IP network

• Devices and applications– Personal vs home/office vs new device types

– Diversity of devices matches market diversity

• A fixed and mobile future– Broadband wireless will connect people

– Optical fibre broadband will connect places

– In some markets, wireless will connect both

– Wireless will dominate broadband in Africa

Content Delivery Networks

• Developed to cache (mirror) files across the Internet• Concept pioneered by Akamai in the late 1990s

• Many CDNs, but a few dominate• Akamai

• Limelight

• Level 3

• Panther

• BitGravity

• Today account for 10% of all Internet traffic

• CDNs today carry more varied traffic, including streaming• Video is about a third of the traffic, but not of the economic value

• The video CDN market will grow to around $1bn by 2012

Sources: Frost & Sullivan, ATLAS Internet

Observatory

Collocation

Managed

Hosting

Server

Hosting

Virtual

Servers

SaaS

The hosting hierarchy

Making an impact…

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