Telkom’s 99.99% promise

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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Opening the 28th SATA (Southern Africa Telecommunications Association) Conference, today, its Chairman and Telkom’s Chief of Global Operations and Subsidiaries, Thami Msimango, said that ‘collective decisions’ will truly empower Southern Africa.

SATA is a regional body for fixed and mobile telecommunications operators and other ICT service providers within the Southern Development Community (SADC). It seeks to coordinate the orderly development of ICT networks and services that are responsive to the diverse needs of commerce and industry in support of the SADC regional socio-economic development programmes.

He continued: “We at Telkom derive great value from being part of SATA, which offers a unique vantage point of the challenges and opportunities on the ICT landscape in sub-Saharan Africa, and an outstanding opportunity to tap into the collective expertise of our peers in the region.”

Msimango added that Telkom especially values the input of our counterparts in Southern Africa at this critical point in time – just two years before the world’s biggest sporting event, the 2010 FIFA World Cup, takes place in Africa for the first time in history.

“We have been entrusted with the task of providing the fixed-line infrastructure that will make it possible to broadcast the soccer action to a global audience hungry for high-definition TV,” said Msimango.

More specifically, he continued, our role is to provide mainly connectivity from each of the 10 World Cup stadiums to FIFA’s International Broadcasting Centre, as well as the infrastructure to support FIFA’s event management systems, volunteer centres, headquarters, hotels and media centres.

Emphasised Msimango: “The project calls for the deployment of massive bandwidth capacity at each stadium, along with high-tech equipment to ensure real, uninterrupted broadcasting capabilities.”

He said that according to the guarantees given by our government to FIFA, there should be 99.99% network availability with no single point of failure on the network for the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

“This speaks to absolute network resilience. In essence planning, engineering and the deployment of the network is where Telkom’s strength will shine through,” Msimango continued.

Msimango pointed out that while the World Cup is not an agenda item at this conference, Telkom’s preparations for it have a bearing on the discussions.

“Firstly, 2010 belongs to everyone in Africa and is an opportunity for the entire continent to show the world that our continent does in fact have the capacity to deliver an event of this magnitude and secondly, the underlying telecoms infrastructure for 2010 will be based on Next Generation Network technologies – another topic close to the hearts of SATA members,” he explained.

FIFA network discussion