T-Systems South Africa has established two Points of Presence (PoP) in South Africa for its globally owned and managed high-speed network. This investment, to the tune of R100-million (€13 million), enables T-Systems to provide guaranteed connectivity to anywhere in the world,

thus linking corporate South Africa to the global market at a very competitive price.

Now South African businesses can access the Telekom Global Network with PoPs in over 125 international locations, a Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) backbone with 26 petabytes of IP traffic per month, over 2,000 access points in more than 50 countries and services delivered to over 300 licensed carriers.

“The significance of being a co-owner of the SAT3 cable is that companies buying into the T-Systems service will in fact become part of a global operator’s network. T-Systems provides a global infrastructure, connecting South Africa on a transactional IP basis,” says Desmond Seeley, General Manager for Telecommunications Services at T-Systems South Africa.

Seeley believes that the launch of the PoPs, situated in Johannesburg and Cape Town, could see the start of real competition in the market where a single company can no longer keep its foot on the throat of local business. “For too long, there has been a logjam of sorts in the telecommunications industry. The opening of the telecoms market in South Africa we is creating opportunities for international businesses to include South Africa in their global networks and encourage foreign investment and development.”

He says that unlike other local service providers, T-Systems does not need to rely on interconnect agreements with third parties. This means T-Systems can provide critical factors such as bandwidth, latency guarantees, security measures and Quality of Service at affordable prices.

“With converged networks literally carrying the lifeblood of businesses – their data, telecommunications and application connectivity – the highest levels of network integrity are critical factors for continuous operations,” he says.

“We can unlock a quality of service and therefore business opportunities that have never existed here before, such as the ability to compete effectively in the call centre market with rivals in the developing world,” Seeley explains.

With an established presence of engineers and support personnel on site in South Africa, Seeley says the T-Systems connectivity service offering also differs from those of other multinational telecoms operators targeting this market. While some organisations have little more than sales offices in this country, T-Systems has a complete local support system in place.

“This means that South African companies can benefit from First World service levels, which is also good news for multinational companies wanting to invest in the country. The launch of these PoPs will not only increase the amount of investment in South Africa and lead directly to further job creation, but the investment by T-Systems also shows that there is both an awareness and a desire to develop the local ICT economy from a grassroots level up.”

“Africa is one of the biggest continents with a huge population, so it definitely needs to be a part of the world stage. What T-Systems is doing is simply playing its part in the development of the African dream,” concludes Seeley.

About MPLS
MPLS is a standards-approved technology for guaranteeing characteristics such as delay and network traffic flow, making it easier to manage. In MPLS networks, a specific path is established for a certain sequence of packets, identified by a label put in each packet, thus saving the time needed for a router to look up the address to the next node to forward the packet to.

MPLS is called multi-protocol because it works with the Internet Protocol (IP), Asynchronous Transport Mode (ATM), and frame relay network protocols. In addition to moving traffic faster overall, MPLS makes it easy to manage a network for quality of service (QoS). For these reasons, the technique is ideal for networks carrying more and different mixtures of traffic – the converged network. Should you have any additional questions please send your queries to communications@t-systems.co.za.