Mail & Guardian reporter
A milestone that marks Telkom’s evolution is the upgrading of its network facilities from analogue to digital all to ensure network reliability, efficient service delivery and the expanding of its range of services to corporate and individual clients.
Today Telkom boasts more than 200000km of fibre-optic cable in its network and more than 99% of its switching exchanges are digital. “This has been the big evolution over the past 10 years that Telkom has undergone … the upgrade of our network facilities positions us competitively with other service providers.”
The bill at the end of the day has been R25-billion to R30-billion. One of the major additions in the transition of the Telkom network has been the National Network Operations Center (NNOC).
The NNOC has enabled Telkom to monitor and control its entire network and has been a key enabler in improving customer service and reliability to the network. The NNOC operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Ken Raley, Telkom’s chief technical officer, says: “The NNOC has been one of the foundation stones for Telkom in being able to serve our customers better today and positions us for the future.”
He says the building of the NNOC was strategic and futuristic in a business sense, and a worthwhile investment to make given the direction of technology and the continuing need to improve customer service. The NNOC has been a key enabler for Telkom to provide services such as managed data networks that meet customers’ business needs for speed and reliability. “All parts of the network are interrelated with one another and to effectively manage you must manage it as a whole. The NNOC allows us to do that.
“As we look back over the past 10 years the real disruptive technology in the telecommunications industry has been to digitise the network; the next major disruptive technology will be convergence. I use the term disruptive in the sense that it is a technology that creates a fundamental change or shift to the business/industry.” Convergence will blur the lines between traditional telecommunications and information technology and will cause the two to merge and move closer to the customer. Much of the technology is still very young and standards are still unclear, but it is where the industry is headed and Telkom is already looking and evaluating its impact.