Southern Cross doubtful of need for Kordia cable

The Dom Post reports that Southern Cross Cable Network says there is little rationale for Kordia to put in place its own international cable.

I disagree. I think competition for international bandwidth is highly desirable and am pleased Kordia are doing so – with Government backing. I do have a minor concern about Kordia’s ownership of Orcon as a vertically integrated state owned ISP may have some unfair advantages, but they can be managed.

Even with Kordia’s new cable, I think we will in the future have a shortage of international bandwidth. That is because rollout of fibre to the home will see bandwidth demands increase 100 fold. Let me use an example Ericsson used in a recent fibre to the home presentation.

Let us say at present you have 5Mb/s speed, and a contention ratio of 50:1. As very few users are using their full speed at any point in time, one can have a high contention ratio as e-mail and web browsing takes up little bandwidth.

Now let us say with fibre to the home you are connecting at 50 Mb/s. That means 10 times the bandwidth needed. But the sort of activities you do on the Internet will change – you may be video conferencing much of the day, and watching Hi Def TV in the evening. So the contention ratio might have to change to be 5:1 not 50:1.

So in a neighbourhood of say 1,000 residents the backhaul bandwidth previously needed was 100 Mb/s. Within a decade it will be 10 GB/s.