Winston's folly

THIS week a cheap PR stunt yielded magnificent results for a South African call centre company.

The branding advantages are questionable as I can't remember who they are. What I do remember is the name Winston - given to a carrier pigeon that managed to deliver 4GB data from Howick to Durban faster than a Telkom ADSL connection could.

South Africans have been complaining about their internet connections for years, but apparently we needed a pigeon to prove that things suck.

Do they?

The truth is that Winston would've beat DSL connections in most of the world, not just South Africa. The problem we have isn't connection speed per se, but rather the capacity of bandwidth we are allowed to access via our connections.

What Winston did achieve, besides for a statement of the obvious, was to distract South Africans from the real issues facing telecommunications and, more specifically, broadband in South Africa.

In so doing Winston feeds the misconception that connection speed matters - when really its about cap sizes and price.

When benchmarking an internet connection there are three primary variables used to gauge its performance; bandwidth, latency and cap size.

Think of a car travelling from point A to point B with passengers in it, which are the data being transferred.

Using this analogy, bandwidth would be the size of the car - or how many people can fit inside it.

It is referred to in the amount of data that can be transferred per second, usually in bits. For example, megabits per second (Mbps) or kilobits per second (kbps).

Latency is the actual speed of the connection, or how quickly and reliably data can be transferred. It is quantified in milliseconds. So if bandwidth is the passenger capacity of the car, latency is its speed limit.

A bus is slow, but carries more passengers - so you'll get people from one point to another more quickly with a bus than a sports car, because you can carry more at the same time. But the sports car is more effective at getting from the one to the other with a small amount of passengers.

Likewise, a large bandwidth connection is good for shipping data, especially in one direction, while a low latency (faster) connection is better for doing things like chatting on Skype which relies on sending small amounts of data quickly.

Finally, cap size is the amount of data you're allowed to access - or the amount of passengers you're allowed to carry in total. There is no use having a bus if you can only carry two people in it.

All about price

Assuming any of the above made sense, lets get back to Winston and the Telkom line.

The fastest Telkom ADSL connection offers peak speeds of 4Mbps and decent latency, especially when communicating in South Africa. It's a fast bus, which is what DSL should be.

Also, contrary to popular belief, Telkom ADSL performs pretty well against some of its international contemporaries in this regard.

I have personally benchmarked a 4Mbps Telkom ADSL connection against a 12Mbps ADSL connection in the UK. Telkom faired pretty well - delivering around 2.8Mbps in actual use during testing, whereas the UK connection seldom went over 3.1Mbps.

There is a difference between the proclaimed capacity of a connection and what one will actually get, as the latter depends on network contention and other factors.

The real problem with ADSL in South Africa is price and cap size. A common cap size in South Africa is 3 gigabytes, whereas internationally caps are seldom smaller than 50 gigabytes - and in many markets, such as the USA, there are no caps at all on this nature of connection. They're virtually unlimited.

That's the South African problem - the bus is a decent size and is pretty fast, but it can only carry a small amount of passengers in total, unless you're willing to pay.

I'm not saying our connections shouldn't be faster in South Africa - only that we have bigger fish to fry.

I'll bet the results of Winston's race wouldv'e been similar if he had taken flight against specifically an ADSL line in almost any other country, barring South Korea, Japan, some Scandinavian countries and a handful of other markets. But what people in the developed world can do that we can't, is to download a lot more data for a lot less money.

And I could've told you that without the help of a bird.

- Fin24.com