MWEB has invested in a four-phased infrastructure and backbone upgrade over the last couple of months – a project which the ISP has now announced is complete.
Rudi Jansen, MWEB CEO, said the first phase was to upgrade MWEB’s link between Johannesburg and Cape Town.
“We’ve gone live with the upgraded link between our Victory Park data centre in Johannesburg and our data centre in Parow, Cape Town. This upgrade represents a 400 percent increase in throughput and we’re now running a 10Gbps network between these centres,” he said.
The upgrading of the line provides improved performance for Cape Town customers who host e-mail with MWEB, which is stored at its Victory Park data centre, as well as Johannesburg subscribers accessing content sites hosted at MWEB’s data centre in Cape Town. For gamers this means more bandwidth for linking customers to MWEB’s various gaming servers in both the Cape Town and Johannesburg data centres.
Phase two saw MWEB go live with its Durban link into Telkom’s IP Connect (IPC) service, which provides access to last mile ADSL infrastructure.
Migrating Durban subscribers from the Johannesburg IPC to the Durban IPC link will improve the ADSL experience for Durban customers who were being served from Johannesburg said MWEB. Again, good news for Durban-based gamers who should see improved performance among their gaming compatriots in the region.
This development makes MWEB the first ISP to have significant IPC bandwidth in Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg.
As part of phase 2, Jansen said MWEB’s 10Gbps national backbone network now has a link between Johannesburg and Durban, and another 10Gbps link from Durban to Cape Town. This means MWEB has created national backbone ring for its network, adding another level of redundancy.
“We now have the ability to route national and international traffic over these links at great speed. With multiple international links, multiple IPC connections and fail-over hardware in all these locations, our redundancy has been boosted significantly,” said Jansen.
Phase three will offer open peering options for other ISPs in Durban at the vendor-neutral Teraco data centre in Durban. “MWEB invites ISPs in Durban to meet and peer with the company at Teraco while we’re waiting for the Durban Internet Exchange (DINX) to be established,” said Jansen.
Lastly, MWEB has added significant international bandwidth managed by Seacom.
“Our total international capacity is now in excess of 23Gbps, across the Seacom and SAT3 cables. Not relying on a single link will further enhance the network performance. We will grow our capacity even further in the coming months, adding new cables when they become available,” said Jansen.
“These kinds of improvements take us closer to the type of Internet experience we want all South Africans to have, where customers are able to experience true triple-play services. We believe that our uncapped, un-throttled Internet offering started that journey of breaking mindsets on restricted Internet usage and these ongoing network enhancements provide increased stability and faster access to online content and services,” said Jansen.
MWEB said that its network is now one of the largest and fastest in the country. “If you are currently with another service provider we’d love you to come and put our network to the test,” Jansen added.
“There are many aspects to being a successful ISP, but at the core is a quality, sustainable network. We’re very proud to own our own network and still see great potential for growing the Internet in this country,” concludes Jansen.
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