Jo’burg shortlists broadband partners

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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THE City of Johannesburg has shortlisted 11 companies as potential partners in its broadband network project aimed at making internet access more affordable to the public.

Although prices have dropped, telecommunications services in the country are still expensive compared with other countries. The majority of South Africans, especially the poor, do not have access to the internet.

Parks Tau, member of the mayoral committee for finance and economic development, said yesterday that the municipality was committed to the development of “a citywide broadband network in line with international trends in municipal broadband deployment”.

He said the project aimed to build a strong information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and to make access to ICT more affordable by “selling off spare capacity”.

He said Johannesburg regarded access to broadband as a key driver of economic growth and wealth generation.

“It is essential that all the citizens of Johannesburg gain access to universally available, reliable and affordable broadband,” Tau said.

Tau said that in order to achieve this, the municipality had embarked on a two-stage bidding process to determine a suitable partner to assist in building, operating and managing the proposed network.

With the help of its supply chain management department, the municipality had shortlisted Goal Technology Solutions, Altech, Neology, Transtel, MTN, Dimension Data, Vodacom, Ericsson, Telkom, MWEB/Tellumat and Sentech.

The fixed-line industry is still dominated by Telkom.

Sentech announced earlier this year that it had drawn up plans to extend its broadband network to give businesses and consumers cheap and high speed access to the internet.

Jabulani Zimu, programme manager in the office of the chief financial officer said: “We now need to assess, whether or not the providers can deliver both technically and practically what they promised to us on paper.”

The municipality would evaluate each of the shortlisted companies in their planning, design, implementation and operating stages of the practical demonstration.

The municipality said it was targeting the first quarter of next year to issue the final request for proposal.

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