Telkom plans to provide South Africa with direct telecommunication links to the rest of Africa in the near future
Jubie Matlou
Apartheid South Africa’s isolation was not confined to political, economic and cultural areas alone, but also extended to telecommunications links with the rest of the world.
Before 1994 direct telecommunications links between South Africa and other countries were largely with immediate neighbours. Direct telecommunications connectivity to other African countries was limited to two countries.
With the advent of democracy, direct telecommunications connectivity has increased to all 14 Southern African Development Community countries and to a total of 30 countries on the continent. Telkom intends increasing this number to connect to almost all 52 African countries in a year or two. Globally, Telkom’s direct connectivity has more than doubled in the past eight years.
This international telecommunications connectivity expansion is not simply a challenge to the corporation but a business opportunity as well.
The task of making the most of these challenges has been given to Roger Chiume the executive in charge of international carrier business and relations.
Chiume says that for many years African countries’ direct telephone contact between one another was relayed through transit centres in Europe, resulting in these countries spending much of their marginal foreign exchange reserves to pay European transit centres.
“With Telkom’s Africa connectivity projects the continent’s intra-Africa telephone communications stand to benefit. The consequence is that the volume of telephone calls from South Africa to the whole continent has increased by 240%, whereas calls from the whole continent to South Africa have increased by more than 1000%. This reflects the spirit of the African renaissance of a dialogue among the people of the continent,” says Chiume.
South Africa has also replaced Europe as a transit centre for calls between Africa and the rest of the world.
“Intercontinental African telephony traffic now goes via South Africa, and it is cheaper for many African countries.”
The African connectivity initiative is not Telkom’s sole responsibility. “Participating countries are encouraged to improve their telecommunications infrastructure. Where and when appropriate Telkom has funded some projects such as the digitalisation of Lesotho’s networks. This will benefit financial institutions and retailers in both countries, resulting in the smooth and speedy transmission of data and voice information,” Chiume says.
Telkom is also funding a R60-million project to upgrade the telecommunications link from Messina to Gweru in Zimbabwe.
“This is a high-capacity digital microwave link that will eliminate existing traffic congestion on that route and provide dedicated circuits for multinational corporations’ data transmissions. This link consists of a number of microwave repeater stations along the entire route and shall provide adequate bandwidth to meet the existing and near-future requirements. This link should be operational by the beginning of October this year.”
In addition, Telkom is assisting in upgrading Zimbabwe’s internal long-distance telecommunications link along the southern part of the country.
Telkom has invested a lot in its links with neighbouring countries through upgrades to using the latest-technology optic fibre and terrestrial microwave links to Namibia, Swaziland, Lesotho, Botswana and Mozambique. Other links between South Africa and the continent are through satellite connectivity.
As South African corporations expand into Africa, Telkom has seized the opportunity to provide these multinational corporations with high-quality satellite-based communication connectivity through their African subsidiaries, bypassing the often unreliable local access networks of the African countries. Throughout Africa, Telkom has installed and manages close to 200 satellite-based terminals for these multinationals. This service provision is undertaken with the cooperation of the local licensed operators in those countries.
Telkom is also extending its international Internet access bandwidth facility to its African counterparts in order to alleviate their constraints in bandwidth provision to their local Internet users.
Telkom has further embarked on a cooperative initiative in which it is assisting its African counterparts to begin to migrate to Internet protocol (IP) technologies in their service to customers. This technology brings cost-effective and advanced value-added products in addition to the traditional voice services. Telkom has therefore positioned itself to be the Africa region clearinghouse for Africa’s IP-based communications.
Perhaps the most ambitious and impressive of Telkom’s global connectivity projects is the submarine cable that will run from Malaysia in the East, via West Africa to Portugal in the West. About 40 countries, a majority of which are African, are investors in this project, with Telkom being the initiator and one of the largest investors.
This group of countries fund, own and operate the more than $600-million undersea cable.
The cable would constitute a three-legged component structure: the Southern Africa-West African submarine cable will consist of a 15000km high-performance fibre-optic cable to link Europe with South Africa and a number of West African countries; second will be the South Africa-Far East 13800km cable to Malaysia through Reunion and Mauritius, and including India; and the third is an upgrade of a 1964 coaxial cable between South Africa and Australia.
“This cable will accommodate 4,8-million telephone conversations at the same time or 8 000 digital television transmissions at the same time. That gives you an idea of its high-technology capacity. And this capacity can be upgraded from the initial capacity of 20-gigabits a second to 120-gigabits a second, to meet future bandwidth requirements,” says Chiume.
One would claim that Telkom will be able to provide limitless inter- national bandwidth to its customers for the next decade and beyond. The cable will be laid on the ocean floor, about 1000m and 3 000m from fishing nets and anchors, protected by an aluminium sheath. It will be operational by the first quarter of 2002.