Web-traffic to soar in 2010

By Alex Kayle for Blue Coat

Johannesburg, 24 Aug 2009

High-speed international bandwidth from Seacom, GLO-1 and Teams will become fully operational by the end of the year, and Eassy and MainOne by 2010.

However, this might not be enough to address the high bandwidth demand for the 2010 Fifa World Cup.

This is according to Dave Ewart, Blue Coat senior product marketing manager for the Europe, Middle East and Africa region, who visited SA last week to meet with local channel partners.

Ewart warns that as more people come into the country for the 2010 World Cup, greater numbers will be using the Internet and the increase in congestion could result in slower Internet speeds.

“You can throw in as much bandwidth as you like, but an application can only go so fast. No amount of additional bandwidth is going to help; it's the latency that is the problem. Applications that offer voice and video in particular, cause higher data traffic congestion.”

Congestion concerns

According to Ewart, in the economic downturn companies need to look even more carefully at their IT investments: “Web 2.0 has made the Web more vulnerable to the cyber community. Using a policy-based control mechanism, there are a lot of criteria which we [Blue Coat] can control, such as what time users can access the Internet and which sites they can and cannot access. It's controlled at a very granular level.”

Ewart says the company is driving its secure Web gateway solution into the South African market, adding that the local market is currently faced with high-cost limited bandwidth.

John Hindley, GM for eSecure Distribution, a company within EOH and a partner of Blue Coat, compares the problem to traffic congestion. With applications becoming faster and more bandwidth-intensive, Hindley warns SA could experience slowed Internet connection speeds, because of the increased number of Internet users and downloads. People will download and send photographs via the Internet and local Web sites will receive a lot of traffic.