Vodacom Business today announced that it has commissioned in excess of 60 customer connections, providing last-mile fibre access to large blue-chip enterprises in mostly the financial, retail and manufacturing industries.<\/p>\n
With the launch of Vodacom Business in February 2008, Vodacom started the process to build its own transmission capacity for the Vodacom network as well as for its corporate customers. Twenty months later, the company said it is proud to announce that eleven core fibre optic rings are in place in the greater metropolitan areas across South Africa – with a total distance of fibre measuring over 720 kilometers. <\/p>\n
“South Africa’s telecommunications landscape is going to be dramatically reshaped over the next few years, as the price of bandwidth plummets and newly empowered businesses and consumers increase their appetite for hosted services and applications,” says Wally Beelders, Chief Officer for Vodacom Business Africa.<\/p>\n
“Within two years we predict there will be no more dial-up Internet access, with the vast majority of home users and small businesses opting for wireless broadband using 3G, ADSL, WiMAX or similar broadband access technologies,” Beelders says. “We see potential for half a million small businesses to come online in the next 18 to 24 months.<\/p>\n
When reliable, fast, cost-effective bandwidth becomes widely available, more and more firms and individuals are likely to choose online application hosting and data storage.<\/p>\n
“When we launched Vodacom Business last year, our objective was, and still is, to lead with a converged solutions strategy in the market place. Meeting the growing demand for broadband connectivity for businesses is vital, while providing a total converged end-to-end service enables us to tailor make solutions according to customer need .”<\/p>\n
Vodacom Business said that it has launched more than 32 individual enterprise services in the past 18 months, with a large portion of its data centre in Midrand being utilised by business customers.<\/p>\n
“For smaller companies and entrepreneurs, the price of bandwidth is probably one of the last barriers to moving most of their applications to an online hosted environment. Yet, in a time of scarce skills and constrained budgets, managing as many IT and communication needs as possible through a single supplier makes sense; freeing small and large enterprises to focus on their core competencies.”<\/p>\n