Looking for partners in Africa: marketing sales

My post does not perhaps belong here and the Forum admin should perhaps move it to different discussion panel.  

I wanted to comment on the statement made by the Forum Admin:  "All prices above for shared service have been removed due to failure to specify sharing ratio."

Frankly I think it would be better if all pricing was kept off the forum, but that's just me.  My issue is the requirement to specify a sharing ratio.  

In my experience, "sharing ratios" are mostly marketing hype.  A sharing ratio or contention ratio only has meaning if a specific number and type of devices and applications are being used for a given service.  For example; if 10 sites share 1Mbps of bandwidth (10:1 ratio), and each of those 10 sites has 10 PCs and performs only basic Internet access (browsing, email); that's 100 PCs sharing 1Mbps, and that service quality might be OK.  However what if the 10 sites each have 50 PCs, and what if half of them run VoIP and the other half run webcams?  That service will be very poor, and highly oversubscribed - yet both advertise a 10:1 sharing ratio.    

Sharing ratios, in my experience are useful for designing a new network when the operator makes some basic assumptions about their "typical" customer and they take into account the expected number of PCs and the 'heavy bandwidth' applications that will use the service.  A sharing ratio gives the network operator a rough guideline for bandwidth needed to begin their new service.

Once it's launched however, all bets are off.  If you end up selling to large sites and there is a lot of real-time traffic such as voice or video, then that 10:1 sharing ratio that sounded so good when you started, may provide service similar to a 40:1 service that was designed right from the start to deliver an oversubscribed residential or small office/home office service.  

Unfortunately there are no objective benchmarks to compare one service provider's service with another.  New services often start out great and quickly degrade as sites are added; as the provider's business model doesn't allow purchase of more bandwidth until "N" sites are installed.  

The best thing customers can do is look for longevity, experience and low churn rate.  As with most things in life, you tend to get what you pay for.

Pat

Hi Sir,

Would you mind to ome back to me giving prices in US$ as I am not familiar with Niara.
I am in Libreville, GABON and I shall be interested to partner with you.

I should prefer to resell CIR bandwidth to professionals and cybercafes.

Visit us at : www.alphasystems.4t.com