We found the fastest line speed in South Africa – This is why you don’t want it

Our internet never seems to be fast enough.

With constant advancements in Fibre and LTE speeds in South Africa, there always seems to be something bigger and better on the horizon.

But how fast can we actually go?

We asked Cybersmart’s Laurie Fialkov what the fastest line speed is in South Africa (theoretical and actual) and when every day users would likely achieve these speeds:

“For the customer it is 10Gbps – the bottleneck is actually your PC.”

“Most PCs can only really sustain a single stream of 400Mbps, which is why lightspeed is marketed at 400Mbps because the average PC struggles to speedtest above that speed.”

Fialkov said that it was relatively easy and effective to offer 10Gbps speeds, but that people grew frustrated when they were not really achievable.

It is a completely different issue when discussing international connections.

“On the international side the bottleneck is both speed and latency, the ack (acknowledge packet) is only ever acknowledged at 144ms (wacs) which means speedtest takes a while to test the speed properly.”

“You will see if you do a local speedtest, the speedtest jumps up immediately to full speed. On an international speedtest the speed will gradually increase until the speedtest ends, and in most cases the speedtest finishes before full speed is reached.”

This is a result of the latency. An international speedtest will usually read between 25-50% of the local speed (the faster the service, the bigger the differential because speedtest does not have enough time to test it properly).

“On the backbone side you can easily/cheaply light 40 wavelength pairs at 10Gbs each. 100Gbs equipment is becoming relatively affordable, so you can in theory light 40 wavelength pairs at 100Gbs.”

“The bottleneck is usually the equipment and not the fibre medium.”