Telecoms wars
Telkom and MTN executives will meet tomorrow to resolve a mudslinging contest over mobile networks.
When MTN SA managing director Tim Lowry said that Eskom and Telkom were largely to blame for the recent upsurge in lost SMSes and dropped calls, Telkom executives scrambled to defend their positions.
Pinky Moholi, Telkom SA managing director, Alphonzo Samuels, group executive of wholesale and marketing operations, and Pierre Marais, group executive of network care and maintenance, came together at a lodge near Telkom’s National Network Operations Centre and went to great pains to explain why they were not to blame for MTN’s or any other mobile operator’s network stability.
They claimed that Telkom had met all service level agreements to provide at least 99.5% network availability to its clients.
Moholi said she had been in touch with MTN SA to discuss the dispute on Monday. “We are amazed that we can be blamed for dropped calls,” Moholi said. “MTN is a major client and we value their business, but we need to defend ourselves.”
Telkom provides access to its leased lines while clients such as the mobile operators provide switches and transmission equipment, managing and maintaining their networks.
Samuels said that it was up to the mobile operators themselves to conduct proper planning before putting in orders for links.
He said: “They are the ones who say they want a certain amount of bandwidth at a certain level of availability, depending on the importance of that particular link.
“We must remember that they can provide their own links if they want to,” Samuels said.
Marais said that Telkom provided 30% more links to mobile providers in 2008 than the year before, but added that the company still had limited “capacity to provide”.
“In our discussions with customers, we say that these are our limitations, so we ask them to give us their priority locations,” Marais said. “When they design their networks, they need to know which links are important so that we can provide a high service level, but they are in control of routing traffic, numbers of subscribers and any special events they might anticipate.”
According to Moholi, some customers furnish as much as 12 months or two years’ notice before they needed a particular link (telecommunications fixed line).
“Before you can provide a service, there is a lot of work to be done. In some areas we can provide a service in two weeks, but in others we need to dig trenches.
“With a lot of corporate clients, discussions happen months before the line is required.
“When you design a network, you build more capacity to allow for growth, but in some areas the growth can supercede any planning you may do,” Moholi said.
She said that there were areas where the company was unable to provide service, but it would say so before signing a deal.
Earlier this week Lowry laid the blame for any network problems squarely at the doors of Eskom and Telkom.
“The key reasons for dropped calls are downtime of base stations due to Telkom line unavailability. We are reliant on Telkom which has had the monopoly on the provision of leased lines,” Lowry said.
Complaints in the media and through other platforms such as the Independent Communications Authority of SA have been mounting against mobile operators, especially MTN.
The public’s anger peaked when M-Net issued an apology after a voting-tally blunder occurred in the final round of reality show Idols.
When it was discovered that finalist Jason Hartman was the actual winner with 200000 more votes than Sasha Lee Davids (who was announced the winner on May 3), M-Net was forced to declare them both winners to save face.
Some observers feel that MTN has ignored its South African network while notching up more subscribers and offering free air time, causing congestion.
The company admitted that it had experienced faults in one of its six network nodes (data distribution points) when complaints began pouring in several weeks ago. Lowry said that this was unprecedented, adding that the node had been replaced.
The company is in the process of building a national fibre-optic network as well as metro-wide networks in the major city centres, but these are nowhere near the size of Telkom’s network.
Telkom versus MTN – give your views
The Times
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