Slow Internet in South Africa — Who to blame

To put the relative sizes in perspective, until recently, the West Africa Cable System represented around 39% of all available undersea fibre cable capacity landing in South Africa.

Equiano and 2Africa are the country’s new subsea kings, contributing around 33% and 40% of unlit capacity.This raises the question — if WACS and SAT–3 have come to represent a vanishingly-small proportion of the international Internet capacity in South Africa, why is it having such a significant impact on people’s experience?Nowadays, much of the content Internet users in South Africa access is stored locally.

Some operate their own content delivery networks, while others use third parties like Akamai and Lumen . Some services, like Netflix and YouTube, continued to perform well throughout our testing, indicating that they are either not dependent on WACS or have sufficient backup capacity. Cloudflare explained that transit providers don’t typically have capacity on all subsea cables — and may only purchase capacity on one or two.

While it could be true that Equiano, 2Africa, EASSy, and Seacom are more expensive than WACS, that is only part of the story. Since their backbone providers don’t have enough capacity to allow them to fill their caches, they push the problem onto consumer ISPs and their upstream transit operators.However, it finally acknowledged the problem after we published our first article about the issues plaguing Disney+ in South Africa due to its NetStorage service rerouting traffic away from its local CDN nodes.

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