The Ultimate Local Only Project

So while that is a huge title to live up to the idea i am about to propose is just as huge.

I can say from personal experience that one of the biggest annoyances with local only internet has got to be gaming. Ok well not really gaming but rather the entire aspect of gaming locally. This begins at the getting a game then playing the game and then updating the game with patches.

Now for the most part this entire process has almost perfected itself overtime and over different platforms. A very good example for the PC market is Steam. Since its launch a lot of people doubted if it could survive in the long run, but now many years after its launch the true colors are showing.

Steam works via the download distribution method i.e. What ever you buy is downloaded to your PC and not shipped to you in any physical form. Also all updates to a game can be done automatically through steam as well. So steam now becomes a central location for buying ,updating and playing games. But the huge flaw in this whole system (at least for us South Africans) is the fact that it depends on having a decent DSL connection and enough bandwidth to download everything you need.

Now as you can imagine you are going to need a ton of bandwidth to download and entire game. Since buying international cap is too expensive the other alternative is to go local.By this i mean setting up a local distribution server. Now while i understand that IS is supposed to cache the Steam content i was not able to get this working and it seems to work on a and off depending if the content has been cached. No this is not what is need , what is needed is a dedicated system that you can depend on to get your content locally .Frankly i am not sure why it has not yet been done because Telkom has been trying to promote the use of local only bandwidth as well as their local gaming.do.co.za , what better a way to promote than to create a service that only your customers can use. I know for sure that i would definitely change to them if that ever happened.

Now the final distribution system that SA is missing and it has been a much contested issue in the past is Xbox Live. When i mean available in SA i mean that i can use local only bandwidth to connect and i can use my region as SA not some international region that i have no interest in supporting. If this service ever came to SA i doubt i would ever by international bandwidth again. First of all these days i spend more time on my Xbox then on my PC secondly i feel the entire experience on live is a whole lot more complete with movie ,TV series and games being available for download , this will help to keep more users connected locally and enhance the brand even further (Its stronger here than it is in some other countries that do have live).

In closing i can for the most part understand why a lot of these company’s do not want to host their services in SA. Somme of these reasons lie in that we don’t have the infrastructure to support their tech , the cost to implement and maintain in SA compared to any where else in the world is significantly higher. Also SA has a much higher security risk of the actual hardware being stolen.

So as always let me know what you think and would you invest in making a better local only  experience for everyone because i know i would.

~stalkerh