NEOTEL, South Africa’s second fixed-line operator, has signed up almost half of the country’s top 350 corporate clients in contracts worth about R1.5-billion, Ajay Pandey, Neotel’s managing director, said on Friday.<\/p>\n
Neotel, controlled by India’s Tata group, was launched in 2006. It started selling corporate services last year and retail services in May, aiming to muscle into a market dominated for years by Telkom.<\/p>\n
Neotel competes for corporate clients with Telkom, Internet Solutions — a unit of Dimension Data — and Verizon SA, which is being bought by MTN. <\/p>\n
Neotel is rolling out wireless and fibre-optic networks to snatch fixed-line revenues from Telkom. Pandey said Neotel had so far invested more than R2-billion in capital expenditure to roll out its network. The group would spend R11-billion over the next 10 years.<\/p>\n