VSAT and Fibre Service Comparison Report

Background
CRS Zimbabwe has been using VSAT Services since 2011. The cost of the service
has been quite high, averaging $13,000 per month. In an effort to reduce the
connectivity costs, the Country program engaged Liquid Telecoms to setup
Internet services over fibre and run a one month trial service which started on
the 10th of February up to the 10th of March 2012 and was subsequently extended
to the 23rd of February. The Country Program also engaged RISA in the
assessment of the fibre performance.
With CRS moving most of its applications to the cloud, a reliable internet
connection has thus become vital. The following compares and summarises the
performance of the fibre connection with respect to the VSAT link.
Comparative Analysis
Subscribed Services
Specification
Bandwidth
Service Provider

Fibre
2Mbps Down and 2Mbps
UP
Liquid Telecoms

VSAT
2Mbps Down and 1Mbps
Up
SkyVision

Average Bandwidth Measured

Fibre

VSAT

Service Reliability
Fibre
6 Incidence reports recorded between
08/02/2012-17/03/2012. All 6 reports had
Service Affecting Status.

VSAT
Nil

Inconsistent speeds for the first 2 weeks

of the trial and the last week of the trial.
High mean-time to repair. Outages can
extend up to a few days giving an uptime
of bellow 80%.

Consistent speeds
A low mean-time to repair which
can take few hours giving an
uptime of around 99.5%.

Link Quality
The link quality for the fibre poor compared to fibre as shown below.
Fibre

VSAT

Latency
Jitter

Security
The VSAT link is relatively secure compares to the fibre connection. This is mainly
due to the following:
Fibre
Can be easily intercepted
Services can be easily be
affected by changing
government policies.

VSAT
Terminates in Israel and can only be tapped
from the antennae.
Service guaranteed by the Private Network
License

Recommendations
The fibre performance during the trial was way below CRS recommended
standard. Although fibre has potential, it still needs to mature and the service
providers need time to grow and adjust since they are still new in Zimbabwe.
Major issues noted were:
1. Local service providers currently connect via 3 rd party networks which they
do not have control over in South Africa and Mozambique. The service
providers in those countries will also have different SLA compared to the
ones offered by the local service provider.
2. Liquid telecoms did not have a redundant link in South Africa as previously
advised. Both links were active and carried traffic all the time and when a
problem was experienced on one link, the other link would become
congested.
3. The level of support currently being offered by Liquid was below
expectations as liquid did not have client portal or efficient helpdesk.
4. Liquid Telecoms did not offer content filtering services which are supposed
to come standard on CRS Networks.