The City of Johannesburg is saving millions of rands through the use of its own high-speed wireless telecommunication network, which connects more than 500 municipal buildings.
So dramatic are the cost savings that the capital costs of establishing the network have been paid in just three months.
Cost savings have meant that all 500 municipal buildings are now connected as opposed to just one-third previously. Connection speeds are significantly faster at 100 megabytes a second rather than the previous 64 kilobytes.
The network is used mainly for data transmission but already some sites are using voice-over-Internet communication, allowing municipal officials to speak to one another by phone without using Telkom lines.
This process is now to be extended so that all the city’s 25 000 officials will be able to communicate with one another on the network.
Wireless microwave stations have been set up on 200 buildings and other high points such as water towers across Johannesburg, with a further 300 to be erected.
The city is now investigating making broadband services available to consumers. However, it is still unclear whether it will offer these services by itself or have to partner with an Internet service provider (ISP). Legal clarity is awaited from the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) and the minister of communications.
Hugh Myres, the CEO of Multisource Telecoms, which has been working with the municipality to roll out the 100Mb microwave link bay stations that form the backbone of the network, says the previous system was costing about R2-million a month.
Johannesburg acting IT director Herklaas du Plessis says that, previously, the city could not connect to all 500 municipal buildings because leased-line costs were prohibitively expensive. So only one-third of buildings were on the network.
“Despite having just 64Kb links and being restricted to connecting just a third of our buildings, the costs of these leased lines were so high that the wireless network paid for itself in terms of the savings of these costs in just three months,” he says.
Du Plessis says the response times achieved on the 100Mb network are “unprecedented”, so much so that some users actually thought the system was not working because they were used to delayed rather than immediate responses.
“Previously they would have to wait sometimes minutes for a request to be processed on a remote server. It now happens instantly.”
Du Plessis says the city is going “wireless crazy”. The municipality recognised the potential benefits of wireless networking as far back as 2001, but needed clarification on whether building a network was legal in terms of the Telecommunications Act.
“Ultimately, we discovered that it was indeed legal and, certainly, given the technology available, highly feasible to deploy our own network,” said Du Plessis.
After consultation with Icasa, Johannesburg applied for a Private Telecommunications Network licence and was awarded spectrum by Icasa on which to establish the network.
Myres says Icasa has allocated the 5,4 frequency for municipalities that want to set up telecoms networks. It is safe from interference, unlike the WiFi band used by a number of wireless devices.
“The risk you run as an operator or ISP is that you will find that there are so many other wireless devices you won’t be able to hear yourself think,” he says. “If you want to offer a controlled service to customers you can’t use the WiFi band in a metro area.
“We knew Telkom was not happy about us getting these licences but there was nothing it could do about it. Icasa had done it in such a way that there was no chance of legal recourse for Telkom.”
Myres says the 300 bay stations that are being rolled out will provide extensive coverage for Johannesburg’s 1 644km2 area.
This increased coverage would allow the municipality to offer broadband services to consumers within the city, but it is still unclear whether municipalities will be able to offer the service themselves or would have to partner with an ISP.
“With the convergence Bill [Electronic Communications Bill] being passed, it seems much more likely that a municipality can apply for a class licence to roll out a public ISP service,” says Myres.
However, a source familiar with Johannesburg’s network construction says it is unlikely that it could sell broadband directly, and that it would have to lease extra capacity to licensed operators.
The city’s economic development department told the Mail & Guardian last week that it has spent the past 18 months researching the best way forward, that by February next year it will have completed its business model and feasibility study. But it failed to mention that the municipality’s network was already up and running.
Stephen Carrot of Andisa Securities does not believe that Telkom will be too concerned about municipal plans to build telecoms networks.
“It’s one thing to say you are going to go into a new industry and it’s a completely different thing to go into the industry and make a success of it,” says Carrot.