MWEB upgrades, times 4

MWEB yesterday announced that it has invested in a four-phased infrastructure and backbone upgrade over the last few months. This upgrade process is designed to improve network performance and increase redundancy.

MWEB has invested in a four-phased infrastructure and backbone upgrade over the last couple of months.

Rudi Jansen, MWEB CEO, says 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 says.

The upgrading of the line provides improved performance for Cape Town customers who host email 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.

Jansen says 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, this improves the ADSL experience for Durban customers who were being served from Johannesburg.

This makes MWEB the first ISP to have significant IPC bandwidth in Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg. Subscribers in all the regions will now have the best possible network in each of these regions. ‚The investment was significant to ensure that the experience in each of the regions is the same as in the others,‚ says Jansen.

MWEB is also creating connections from the vendor neutral Teraco Data Centres in Isando (Gauteng) and Rondebosch (Western Cape), to the Teraco data centre in Durban.

As part of phase 2, Jansen says MWEB’s10Gbps national backbone network now has a link between Johannesburg and Durban. A further 10Gbps link from Durban to Cape Town completes the national backbone ring and further enhances redundancy in the core network.

‚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,‚ says Jansen.

Phase three will offer open peering options for other ISPs in Durban at the neutral Teraco data centre in Durban, providing faster access onto the MWEB network. ‚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,‚ says 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,‚ says 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,‚ says Jansen.

MWEB’s network is now one of the largest and fastest in the country, he adds. ‚If you are currently with another service provider we’d love you to come and put our network to the test.‚

‚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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