A friend who happens to be an IS customer forwarded me an e-mail from the company last week that explains a lot. IS has been supplementing its peering link to SAIX with international bandwidth for over a year now. If the local peer at Jinx goes down or is overloaded (which has been happening with depressing regularity recently) then IS re-routes local SAIX-bound traffic via its international link.

It is slower, of course, but at least it guarantees that you can see local sites. Then Telkom rejected all inbound traffic to SAIX if it had an IS source address, effectively leaving IS at the mercy of the local peering link, which, as I said, is overloaded and sometimes down. A day later I received a report that customers of another major ISP were experiencing problems connecting to local Web sites because of the peering fiasco. Some local sites were available, some were not.

The knock-on effect was bad: many ISPs are now not switching traffic over to the IS backbone (if I remember correctly, SAIX was asked to upgrade the local peer but wanted a million rands a month for it). On the same day Telkom's share price hit an all-time high of R144. A day later the issue was resolved, but we are not really going to bridge the digital divide like this.

Roll on the redrafted bill, where infrastructure competition and forced leasing of the local loop will, hopefully, prod Telkom into acting more in the interests of all South Africans.

(Charl Bergkamp is an overworked, underpaid systems support engineer in the Lambda Bureau, the ICT department of the Ministry of Boards, Committees and Working Groups. He would love to hear from kindred spirits in the ICT corporate world. Send tip-offs, hints and blatant accusations to charl.bergkamp@gmail.com).