South Africa’s office parks are devouring broadband connectivity to such an extent that OTEL has quadrupled its network capacity since 25 December 2015. The independent telco says the upgrade took place between Christmas and New Year and saw its clients return to work to be pleasantly surprised by a more stable and much faster network.
“There’s a massive pent-up demand for enterprise quality high-speed voice and data broadband services in the country’s business and industrial clusters,” says Rad Jankovic, CEO of OTEL. “This demand is driven by the realisation that contracting with independent telcos is the way to go because of affordability, quality and reliability issues with some of the more complacent telecoms sector incumbents,” he adds.
This bandwidth boost has been made possible through the expansion of OTEL’s peering facilities at NAPAfrica and increased backhaul capacity secured from dark fibre firms. NAPAfrica is a neutral Internet Exchange (INX) point located within Teraco’s local data centres.
On the broadband services being consumed within the country’s many office parks, Jankovic says the demand for cloud services and over-the-top (OTT) applications that could run independently of traditional voice and data services was helping drive demand for OTEL’s offerings.
Many of South Africa’s business parks are reliant on ADSL provided over copper which has speed and availability constraints compared to high-speed, always-available fibre optic underground cable delivered via FTTB rollouts.
“One of the benefits of smaller FTTB providers is their willingness to be flexible and design true bespoke offerings that the cast-in-stone Service Level Agreements (SLAs) churned out by the larger incumbents just cannot match,” says Jankovic.
OTEL’s FTTB solutions that are designed to increase profitability and reduce downtime include hosted PBX, free email, server hosting, cloud computing, as well as call centre solutions including call recording and autodialing, amongst other value-added voice and data services.
“We initially thought that quadrupling capacity in December would be satisfactory for the next 12 months. However, after experiencing what January has been like, we believe we’ll be due for another network expansion in 8 months,” concludes Jankovic.
The company is a licensed business-to-business provider of VoIP & broadband Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions. Its nationwide dedicated network and cutting-edge technology positions OTEL as one of South Africa’s leading wholesale telecoms providers.