MTN announced today (2 July 2012) that their national long distance fibre optic network, which is built in collaboration with Neotel and Vodacom, is nearing completion. “Two major MTN nodes, New Germany and Durban, [are] ready to go live on the MTN network,” the company said.
“50% of the fibre floating, and over 95% of the total route trenching, has been completed – certainly a key milestone in our network footprint which is designed and optimised to link major population centres and economic hubs, as well as interconnect with the international submarine cable landing sites,” said Kanagaratnam Lambotharan, CTO at MTN.
“We are excited about the two major nodes that have gone live as they are designed to accommodate significant capacity, thus enabling MTN to cater for additional customers in the area, where incremental capacity can also be used to service corporate customers with dedicated hosted and converged solutions.”
The project, which began in 2009, marked one of the largest collaborations in the South African telecommunications industry, covering 5,000km and connecting major city centres across South Africa.
“This initial route plays a significant role in MTN’s goals to take Africa to the world and bring the world to Africa by linking up with the EASSy undersea cable on the East coast,” MTN said.
“The network is designed to connect directly with MTN’s international cable assets, thereby allowing for tier 1 Internet backbone access and high quality connectivity with other MTN operations across Africa and the Middle East,” said Lambotharan.
MTN said that they will be “working hard” to ensure that the remaining nodes are connected within the next few months.
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