That is very much to be expected, if nothing else due to pent-up
demand. The existing vsat infrastructure tends to be pretty saturated,
meaning that users experience a lot of loss as well as delay. What if
they stop losing traffic?
War story: in 1995 I found myself sharing a podium with Phill Gross,
who was then a VP with MCI. He was more or less apologizing for the
behavior of his network. They had recently upgraded to a then-new-and-
gee-whiz OC-3 infrastructure, in many places using parallel bandwidth,
and were dropping a lot - he reported one link to be dropping 20%. So
they then upgraded the whole thing to OC-12 - and fiber that was OC-3
was replaced with an OC-12. They presumed that this would give them
75% overprovisioning at worst. What they actually saw was that those
links that had been dropping 20% were now dropping 4%. TCP observed
that it was not getting crunched into the ground, and started opening
its windows.
The other big issue with satcom is of course delay, and with
conversion to fiber the delay plummets. That means that where you
might have had <mumble> connections running at <low> average speed due
to RTT, the average connection speed for the same session is instantly
multiplied by <old-RTT>/<new-RTT>. That gives the user time and
incentive to click again during that same time window - new load.
Price is very important, of course, but I suspect your 100 MBPS is
explainable by simple network dynamics.
On Aug 5, 2009, at 6:13 AM, Raymond Macharia wrote:
Hello all,in the last two weeks or so providers in East Africa,
particularly
in Kenya where I am, have been moving from Satellite to Fibre for the
internet Back bone connectivity. From where I am I have seen an
upsurge of
about 100Mbps in the last two days from my users. It would be
interesting to
know if anyone out there has seen an increase in traffic from this
region
and by how much. There is more to come as providers are cutting
prices and
adding bandwidth to their networks.
Best Regards
Raymond Macharia
