Jennigay Coetzer – Business Day – 30 July 2009

Three fundamental technology shifts are happening that affect the telecommunications market and relate to bandwidth and computing power, as well as storage capacity. The combination of advances in these areas will create an abundance of capacity at reasonable prices, says Wessie van der Westhuizen, chief strategic officer at Altech.

“Computing power is doubling every 18 months, storage capacity every 12 months and bandwidth every nine months.” He says convergence of voice, data and multimedia services also depends on these three factors.

“It is no good just focusing on bandwidth.” With the latest technologies powering their networks, operators will be able to increase capacity and deliver services more efficiently and cost effectively.

As the capacity of the networks increases and costs come down, connectivity services will become more affordable to a broader sector of the population. At the same time, the power and capacity of user computing devices will increase.

US scientist and futurist Raymond Kurzweil predicts that by 2017 it will possible to buy a $1000 computer that will emulate the human brain. In SA international bandwidth will be boosted by the new Seacom undersea cable and the West African Cable System (WACS) scheduled to go live in 2011.

This new capacity will add to that of the existing SAT-3/SAFE/ WASC cable controlled by Telkom, says van der Westhuizen. He says the level of broadband penetration in SA is low, at about 2%, and the rest of Africa is even lower, especially in central and east Africa.

A year ago, Altech bought a controlling stake in Kenyan company Sameer ICT, which in turn owned three other companies including Kenya Data Networks (KDN), which builds and rents fibre infrastructure to operators. These three companies now run under the control of Altech Stream East Africa.

KDN has laid down terrestrial fibre infrastructure that covers most of Kenya and recently went live with a terrestrial fibre link between the Kenyan coastal city of Mombassa and Kampala in Uganda. The KDN terrestrial fibre infrastructure will link up with Seacom and other undersea cables, providing the region with international links.

The other two Sameer ICT subsidiaries are Kenyan ISP Swift Global and Ugandan ISP Infocom, which builds its own infrastructure. “We also have a start-up ISP business in Rwanda,” says van der Westhuizen.

He says Altech has international gateway licenses to carry cross-border telecommunications traffic into and out of SA and the rest of Africa. “This means we can pick up traffic from the undersea cables and transport it anywhere our networks are running,” says van der Westhuizen

The company also has a 10% equity stake in The East Africa Marine System (TEAMS) undersea cable, commissioned by the Kenyan government, which will link Mombassa on the cost of Kenya to Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates and from there to Singapore and Europe. “This will give us a 10 gigabit per second link,” he says.

Altech has also bought capacity on the Seacom undersea cable, for which there is a landing point in Mombassa. With guaranteed capacity on both these cables, each one will provide an alternative route to the other and remove dependency on one service, says van der Westhuizen. “We are also planning to have fibre infrastructure running to Kigali in Rwanda before the end of this year,” he says.

In SA, Altech’s well publicised, landmark court victory forced the telecommunications regulator Icasa to issue new licenses to it and hundreds of other service providers at the beginning of this year, allowing them to set up their own infrastructure. “We wanted the freedom to do so, although we have no intentions of building a national network,” says van der Westhuizen.

He says the company might build infrastructure to deliver services to customers instead of relying on someone else’s timelines. In the local market, Altech recently acquired Technology Concepts, which provides ISP and hosting services.