On 4/22/24 09:47, Vasilenko Eduard via NANOG wrote:
Assume that some carrier has 10k FBB subscribers in a particular municipality (without any hope of considerably increasing this number). 2Mbps is the current average per household in the busy hour, pretty uniform worldwide. You could multiply it by 8/7 if you like to add wireless -> not much would change. 2*2*10GE (2*10GE on the ring in every direction) is 2 times than needed to carry 10k subscribers. The optical ring may be less than 20 municipalities - it is very common. Hence, the upgrade of old extremely cheap 10GE DWDM systems (for 40 lambdas) makes sense for some carriers. It depends on the population density and the carrier market share. 10GE for the WAN side would not be dead in the next 5 years because 2Mbps per household would not grow very fast in the future - this logistic curve is close to a plateau. PS: It is probably not the case for Africa where new subscribers are connected to the Internet at a fast rate.
As a function of how much Internet there is in Africa, there really aren't that many optical transport service providers. Some countries/cities/towns have more than they need, others have just one. But in general, you would say there is massive room for improvement if you surveyed the entire continent. Typically, it will be the incumbents, alongside 2 or 3 competitives. In fact, in some African countries, only the incumbent may be large enough to run an optical backbone, with all the competitives leasing capacity from them. It is not uncommon to find the closest competitor to an incumbent for terrestrial services being the mobile network operator, purely because they have some excess capacity left over from having to build the backbone for their core business, mobile. And, they are flush with cash, so a loss-making terrestrial backhaul business can be covered by the month's sales in SIM cards. Truly independent transport providers are few and far between because access to dark fibre is not easy (either its lack of availability, the incumbent refusing to sell it, or its high price). For the few independent transport providers that do spring up, they will focus on a limited set of hot routes, and because competition on those routes may be wanting, prices and capacity would not be terribly attractive. So the bulk of Africa's Internet really relies on a handful of key African wholesale IP Transit providers taking great effort into extending their network as deep into cities as they can, and using their size to negotiate the best prices for terrestrial backhaul from the few optical network operators that the market has. Those providers then sell to the local and regional ISP's, who don't have to worry about running a backbone. All this means is that for those operators that run an optical backbone, especially nationally, 10G carriers are very, very legacy. If they still have them, it'd be a spin-off off the main core to support some old SDH customers that are too comfortable to move to Ethernet. Metro backhaul and last mile FNO's (fibre network operators) who have invested in extending access into homes and businesses are a different story, with most countries having a reasonable handful of options customers can choose from. Like national backhaul, there is plenty of room for improvement - in some markets more than others - but unlike national backhaul, not as constrained for choice or price. Mark.