Have we under estimated Telkom?
When the CSIR announced that it had awarded the contract for the installation of the national backbone for the SANReN network to Telkom some days ago, it must have raised a few eyebrows.
For a long time readers of this forum have been critical towards Telkom stemming partly from its past exclusivity and its high prices. Perhaps Telkom had a good idea where it was going using the available funding it generated to build a national grid that would stand back for nothing. I am not defending it pricing history but just looking at it objectively that “some one” had to have enough funding to build this huge national grid.
With others, like Neotel expanding their national grid and Dark Fibre Africa building national fibre connections, coming to the party I believe we will soon see more broadband benefits for you and me. We will start to see competition at play.
Looking at the current state of national connectivity Telkom appears to be the only provider of Broadband that can meet the requirements for this important research network.
In 2003 the SANReN initiative was conceptualised in partnership with the then Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology. Extensive planning and consultation on the South African approach to high performance computing and research networking (CHPC) were conducted. SANReN and CHPC were discussed in Cabinet and the budget line items as part of the research infrastructure budget of the Department of Science and Technology (DST) were approved and announced during Minister Mangena’s budget speech in 2006.
The responsibility for the implementation and planning was given to the Meraka Institute of the CSIR which at that stage was already involved with the process of establishing the CPHC. A three year contract was signed between the CSIR and DST in 2006 for the implementation and management of this project. Meraka had signed a comprehensive Memorandum of Understanding with TENET.
TENET is a section 21 company with the Universities and Research Councils as members. In the past it struck a deal with Telkom to provide the bandwidth and management of the network. Some two years ago TENET started looking at building their own network and taking control and obviously looking for better pricing. The tender was won by a combination of Internet Solutions (IS) and Neotel with IS providing the hosting and Neotel the MPLS backbone.
While Meraka has the overall responsibility for the network and is taking care of the planning and implementation TENET is responsible for its operation.
The new SANReN national backbone will interconnect Pretoria, Johannesburg, Bloemfontein, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East London and Durban on a 10 Gb/s optic fibre ring network. This network will enable the research community to engage in meaningful online collaboration. It will also be used to link to international bandwidth acquired for research purposes which is being supplied by SEACOM at a greatly reduced cost. The SEACOM deal amounts to 40 times the amount of bandwidth for the price up to now being paid by TENET for its 250 Mbit pipe out of the country.
May be some of us were too quick to judge Telkom’s ability to build a world class NGN network?
Telkom & SaNREN network discussion
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