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| Rudolph Muller | June 27, 2007 | No comments |
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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MTN is investing around R 10-Million in a pilot fiber network project, and may look at further investments in future.
MTN’s new Managing Director, Tim Lowry, said that MTN SA is busy building a fiber network between Sandton and Rosebank, and that the company will assess the benefits of self provisioning and the financial feasibility of similar projects in future.
Lowry made it clear that MTN is not interested in building their own fiber networks across the country, but said that the company can not afford to be held back by a lack of supply of backhaul bandwidth.
MTN SA is currently dependant on Telkom for much of its fixed line network infrastructure, and Lowry said that it is a very costly part of their operations with the added burden of a backlog of installations proving to be a problem.
“Transmission services delivered through Telkom are currently one of MTN’s largest operational costs. Telkom cannot meet full market demand and this impacts on our ability to expand MTN’s voice and data footprint,” Lowry said.
Self provisioning can alleviate some of the problems that MTN are currently experiencing and the company said that it is one of the avenues that is considering to improve its service delivery. “Self-provision is becoming more important as an element of our growth and sustainability strategy,” Lowry said.
He pointed out that the South African telecoms environment is changing fast and that more opportunities for partnerships are opening up. Neotel is an obvious partner in the provisioning of backhaul bandwidth, but Lowry added that a possible partnership with their rival Vodacom in this arena is not out of the question.
Vodacom recently announced that it will be investing heavily in its own fiber networks in future, partly to serve the needs of its newly formed Vodacom Converged Solutions.
MTN’s pilot fiber network, which will link Rosebank and Sandton, is already up and running in the Sandton district and serving some of the JSE’s telecoms needs. “Installation of fibre network to service our own facilities is already underway with capacity to be offered commercially to corporate clients,” Lowry said.
The new MTN MD highlighted that while the pilot project and possibly future fiber networks may initially serve the purpose of providing the much needed transmission network capacity for their mobile operations, the additional bandwidth will open various new business opportunities to the company.
