Thu, 15 May 2008 10:14:49 +0200
This change is a follow on from the
change that occurred on April 15. In this change, Rhodes will migrate from Telkom's commercial TI-DIS service onto the GEN3 research and education network. GEN3 is the successor to the previous GEN2 contract, and represents a fundamental shift in the way higher education buys Internet access in South Africa; in essence it is the preparatory work required for the South African National Research Network (SANReN). The major difference is that in GEN2 we bought layer 3 (full IP routing) Internet access from a single service provider; in GEN3 we, through
TENET, buy a range of different services from a consortium of providers (including
Neotel and
The Internet Solution) and use these services to build a complete network. This is a technically exciting change, but it is something that will go largely unnoticed by the vast majority of end users at Rhodes. Much of the history of the change is explained in the
previous post.
It is important that we clarify some mis-perceptions at this point: Unfortunately, GEN3 will
not give us a particularly big increase in Internet bandwidth. Whilst we might see small improvements, this change is not intended to address the
ongoing over-subscription of our Internet bandwidth. The intention is that this problem will largely be addressed by a future (and as yet undetermined) connection to SANReN, and by the University's investment in a portion of the
SEACOM submarine fibre optic cable that's set to come online in the second half of next year.
As a result, it is unlikely that there will be significant changes in the current Internet quotas as a result of the migration to GEN3.