nanog mailing list archives

Re: Quality of the internet


From: Mark Tinka <mark.tinka () seacom mu>
Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 15:27:26 +0200



On 18/Jun/20 14:56, Saku Ytti wrote:

Somewhere between 2000..2005 I personally still delivered customer
connections that needed that. But we were providing 64kbps still to
some odd locations, like paper mill in the middle of nowhere. I also
needed to do MLPPP over 2*64kbps so that serialising single 1500B
doesn't take too long (PPP could fragment it to two and send parallel,
improving UX).

VoIP was legalized in South Africa in 2005.

The moment that happened, VoIP operators sprung up, and businesses began
dumping POTS services and moved over to VoIP. In those days, a 64Kbps
leased line was the gold standard; major props if you had anything more
than that; bow-downs if you had 256Kbps or 512Kbps.

We're talking +/- US$1,500/month for a 64Kbps at the time, when the
US$-ZAR exchange rate was 1:6.65.

Customers were willing to pay all that cash back then, because all these
shiny new TDP-based (Tag Distribution Protocol, for the ones who
remember, before it became the LDP standard) MPLS networks were the
guarantors of QoS, and to ensure your VoIP service always received a
steady 16Kbps to deliver two simultaneous phone calls between Jo'burg
and Durban, cash left wallets.

It was still cheaper than paying the telco for an E1. And of course,
there was an eerie eagerness to stick it to the telco :-).

Oh, how far we've come.

Mark.



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