Examples are a powerful way to clarify what you are saying when writing any type of article, because human beings don’t think in words. They think in pictures. So making strong statements in your articles and then qualifying them with examples, will help to create a clearer picture in the minds of the target audience you are writing for.

Examples will also help to put your viewpoints, or those of a spokesperson, into context. For instance, when writing an article in which you are promoting a concept, idea, approach, methodology, product, or service, it is useful to include brief examples of how it has benefited those who are already using it or have applied it.

In another scenario, you might want to get the message across that your company operates across different sectors. In this case, you could use specific examples of how customers in three or four sectors have benefited from the solution you are promoting, in different ways.

If you don’t want to mention customer names, you can just say something like, “A customer of ours in the retail sector….etc.” The examples will still be useful to the reader, and will help to get your message across in the article you are writing.

Examples of how a product or service works, and how it can benefit the target audience will also help to create a clearer picture. Varied examples can also be useful. For instance, you might want to get across the message in your article that the product you are promoting can be used in different ways, in which case you can give examples that will illustrate this in words.

Jennigay Coetzer is a freelance business and technology journalist with 25 years experience, and she writes regularly for Business Day. She also runs media training and writing skills workshops, and is the author of A Perfect Press Release – or Not?, a guide to writing and distributing effective press releases, an electronic version of which can be downloaded free from her website: www.jennigay.co.za.

Every article should have an objective behind it, it should focus on a clearly defined topic, and it should be written with a specific audience in mind. Without a clearly defined topic, you are likely to end up with too many ideas in your article, which will confuse your audience, and writing it will be a major challenge. Similar problems will arise if you don’t have a clear objective.

Once you have established these basics, put yourself in the audience’s shoes and think about what they would be interested in knowing about the topic, as opposed to just what you want to tell them.

It is worth remembering that your audience may be made up of people that have varying social and educational backgrounds, perceptions, cultures, and levels of understanding of the topic you are writing about.

Some may also have a limited vocabulary and grasp of the English language. This is  particularly applicable with articles you are planning to publish on a website, because anyone could stumble across them while searching for information.

It is therefore wise to write the article in plain English with the lowest possible common denominator of the audience in mind, and not use unexplained terminology or assume any prior knowledge of the topic.

Have a conversation with the reader, making sure you haven’t left any questions in their minds, because if you do this will frustrate them, and they will not enjoy your article. To test this out, once you have written your article, you can apply the So what? technique.

Read the article through and ask “So what?” after each sentence and make sure you have answered this question in the next sentence or two.

Jennigay Coetzer is a freelance business and technology journalist with 25 years experience, and she writes regularly for Business Day. She also runs media training, communication skills, and writing skills workshops, and is the author of A Perfect Press Release – or Not?, a guide to writing and distributing effective press releases, an electronic version of which can be downloaded free from her website: www.jennigay.co.za.

Soon after we got together in 1986, my partner bought me David Attenborough’s Life on Earth (The Reader’s Digest augmented and enlarged edition). I was bowled over. It was undoubtedly my best birthday present ever. Better than my first little radio, my bicycle and my Volkswagen Beetle.

It went deeper and further into that wonderful world that Attenborough was bringing to South African TV audiences just then, opening up and explaining the biggest topic of all – from the Big Bang all the way to me, right here, right now.

After 20, my partner has bettered that gift. For my last birthday I got a Kindle. I am in love. My Kindle goes with me – everywhere. I read more than I did even in my teens, when I huddled up with my book and a torch under the blankets after lights-out. And I read what I want to read, instead of what is available in the bookshops.

Even while I was waiting for the arrival of my little package from Amazon, I Googled and found the best novels of the century, the best fiction ever written, the best novels in English, all the Pulitzer Prizewinners, the winners and shortlisted authors of the Booker Prize for Fiction, and I created my ideal reading list. When my Kindle arrived, I had already downloaded the greatest part of my reading list, partly from Amazon on my Kindle account, but mostly from Project Gutenberg (a group of volunteers who make electronic copies of public domain books available for free).

Having been educated in an Afrikaans school and university, I am seriously under-read when it comes to great classic literature. I am now diving into Jane Austen, the Brontës, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Edith Wharton (don’t you just love The Age of Innocence?) and more in a feeding frenzy. For light relief I charged through the latest John le Carré, because waiting for me was Mary Glickman’s Home In The Morning and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, which everyone’s been telling me to read.

I am also reading deeper. With Wikipedia and a dictionary just a click away, I easily find information when I want to understand where this town is, what this word means, what happened in history at this time. Why is the author so derogatory about this character who has decorated his home with this artwork?

Why, let’s click and have a quick look at the painting on Wikipedia. Wikipedia also offers me comments, criticisms and backgrounds to the author and the books. All on my Kindle. I love reading in coffee shops. Whenever someone at a table close by irritates me, I pop in my earphones and have my favourite jazz or a bit of Mozart to enhance my coffee and Conrad.

A man walked past one day, studied me for a moment, and then crinkled up his face as if in a moment of exquisite enjoyment, clutched his heart and smiled at me. Yeah, that’s the life… Criticism? Just that copyright laws prevent me from getting some of the books I want from Amazon.

But then I can get them from other suppliers, and use free software from the web to change the format from ‘epub’ to ‘mobipocket’. Some people tell me they would never adapt to an e-reader. “I just need the feel and smell of a real book,” they say. I say, hey, read on your Kindle, and keep a book next to your bed for an occasional sniff.

These include a number of the latest advances in microscopy—from a pocket microscope that can be connected to a cell phone’s optics to tools that smash the resolution limitations of traditional scopes, a tool that measures light exposure and circadian rhythms, and a first-of-its-kind 360-degree optical imager.

Lucas, a pocket-sized microscope that weighs less than 50g, uses inexpensive, off-the-shelf parts, costs as little as $10, and can be attached to a cell phone’s camera, making it ideal for diagnosing disease in isolated, developing countries.

It illuminates cells with an inexpensive light-emitting diode, captures the shadows they cast, and then processes and recreates the image using an algorithm run on a remote computer. The translucent cells cast textured shadows that can reveal internal cell features such as malaria parasites, and can image very large areas.

Then there is the battery powered, dime-sized Dimesimeter circadian watch, which can be worn as a wristband, pendant, or pinned on clothing, may offer researchers insights into how disrupting circadian rhythms affects human physiology, behavior, and disease, and it costs $100.

The Dimesimeter contains optical sensors and accelerometers that measure both the light exposure and activity of the person wearing it. The device then transmits data wirelessly to a docking station, which can be linked to a computer.

By quantifying the amount of light that people are exposed to, it can provide new insights into a lot of diseases, and has been used in a study that determined optimal home lighting conditions to improve sleep efficiency in Alzheimer’s patients.

The Dimesimeter’s optical setup consists of red, green, and blue light detectors that measure light exposure of the subject. Through post processing, researchers can determine the amount circadian light (the light that modulates the biological clock) entering the eye.

The full story of the 2011 Top Ten Innovations, with pictures, is published on the Scientist’s website.

Good writers probe deeper and deeper into their topic, asking questions like: Why did this happen? What were the influences behind this? Where, when and why did this all start? What are the origins of this trend? Who will be affected, and how will they be affected? Which of the various opinions about this is the most credible? Is the source of the information reliable and knowledgeable?

It is difficult for article writers to ask leading questions of the spokespeople they are interviewing that will provide rich content for their articles if they do not understand the topic. If article writers only have a superficial or fragmented understanding of the topics they are writing about, it will be reflected in the articles they are writing.

When this happens, it will confuse the reader, and leave a lot of unanswered questions in their minds. As a result they will stop reading it and go and look for another article that is more enlightening, and is obviously written by an article writer who knows what they are writing about.

Jennigay Coetzer is a freelance business and technology journalist, with 25 years experience, and she writes regularly for the South African daily newspaper Business Day.  She also runs writing skills, media training, and communication courses, and is the author of A Perfect Press Release – or Not?, a guide to writing press releases, which can be downloaded free from her website: www.jennigay.co.za.

Did you know that Steve Jobs did not invent the latest and greatest Apple products? It was British born Jonathan (Jony) Ive, who is to be knighted by the Queen.

Among other things, Ive is credited with designing the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, iMac, and was the lead designer behind various MacBook versions including the MacBook Air. He is currently senior vice president of industrial design at Apple, a position he attained after Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997.

Ive was appointed a Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (KBE) in the UK New Year Honours and will in future bear the title of Sir Jonathan Ive.

The honour is being bestowed on him in recognition for raising design standards in consumer, industrial and professional goods and for his championing of British design.

Ive was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2006 New Year Honours for services to the design industry.

In another new year story, a 29 year old prototype of a fixed line phone/tablet device that was developed in 1983 has been unearthed from Apple’s archives.

The prototype was designed by German born Hartmut Esslinger, who is also credited with designing the early Apple IIc computer, which was launched in 1988.

Jennigay Coetzer is a freelance business and technology writer, and she runs media training and article writing skills courses. She is also the author of A Perfect Press Release – or Not? – a guide to writing press releases and other articles, which can be downloaded free from her website.

Only an experienced journalist will be able to give spokespeople insight into what the media look for in a good spokesperson, and provide them with the skills to become one.

The right form of media training will equip spokespeople with techniques that will help them anticipate any eventuality in any interview scenario, prepare accordingly, organise their thoughts, and share knowledge clearly and concisely in a two-way discussion with a media interviewer.

Anyone who interacts with the media or is planning to do so will benefit from media training. Natural spokespeople do exist, but they are few and far between. Interestingly, these spokespeople are usually the first to jump at the chance of honing their media interaction skills.

At the other end of the scale are those who spurn the suggestion of media training because they consider themselves to be great spokespeople already with no room for improvement.

Meanwhile they are often the worst spokespeople to interview, due to their inflated egos, arrogant, know-it-all attitude, superficial knowledge, and a tendency to speak at the journalist instead of engaging in a two-way conversation.

Jennigay Coetzer is a freelance business and technology journalist with 25 years experience, and she writes regularly for Business Day. She also runs media training, writing skills and communication courses, and is the author of A Perfect Press Release – or Not?, a guide to writing press releases, which can be downloaded free from her website: www.jennigay.co.za.

There is much activity on the go across Africa in the race to build terrestrial fibre networks to connect towns and cities to the increasing number of undersea cables that are landing along the east and west coasts.“But this is not happening as quickly as it was envisaged,”  says Howard Earley, chief operating officer at Plessey Group.

He says there was a lot of hype about how the undersea cables would increase speeds and bring down costs. But internet connectivity services can only deliver as fast as the slowest point in the network.

In South Africa, progress is being hindered by environmental regulations that involve a lot of red tape, which did not exist a few years ago. For example If the cable needs to cross any water, or even a dry river bed, this requires approval from the department of water affairs and the relevant local municipality.

To complicate matters still further individual municipalities have different requirements.
“When the first fibre cables were laid, the infrastructure builders just went ahead and did it.”

He says environmental issues were one of the factors that delayed the fibre network recently completed by Dark Fibre Africa that runs between Gauteng and Kwazulu-Natal. “We dug the trenches and laid the ducting for the fibre for this,” says Earley.

The building of this link required the owner to meet the environmental requirements of 27 municipalities on route. He says Plessey is working on a similar project to lay trenches and ducting for the national network being built by the Neotel, MTN and Vodacom consortium.

Further up Africa, over the past two years Plessey built a large portion of the Trans-Kalahari fibre network, which runs from the SA side of Botswana to Namibia. Other terrestrial fibre projects are underway that will run from Kampala on the east side of Uganda to Mombassa on the east coast of Kenya to link up with the Seacom and EASSy undersea cables.

Fibre infrastructure projects have also started in Rwanda, Burundi, Zambia, and Tanzania that will eventually link up with this fibre network. All three operators in Nigeria are planning long distance fibre networks from Lagos or Port Harcourt on the coast to Abuja, the capital of Nigeria inland, says Earley.

An increasing number of fixed line and mobile operators, ISPs and other service providers and their customers are interconnecting through central hubs, or internet exchanges. In line with this global trend, Teraco, has built two of these exchanges, which are located in Cape Town and Johannesburg and it is opening a new facility in Durban in August.

The exchanges consist of a large data centre that is equipped with cooling and heavy duty power supply. Tenants then rent dedicated space and install networking equipment to enable them to interconnect with each other and with their customers.

“We sell space to many ISPs that in turn sell to smaller ISPs,” says Lex van Wyk, MD of Teraco. He says UK company Telehouse were early adopters of this concept 20 years ago and are one of the leaders in this field.

“Some 80% of the world’s internet traffic passes through Telehouse’s internet exchanges.”
Teraco’s Cape Town premises covers 500 square metres of space and the company is looking to expand this by another 1,200 square metres this year.

Its Johannesburg premises covers 1250 square metres of space, which is already fully occupied, and plans are afoot to expand this by another 1000 square metres by the end of the year. Some corporate organisations are also using the exchanges as a disaster recovery site for their own data centres, says van Wyk.

Jennigay Coetzer is a freelance business and technology journalist and she writes regularly for Business Day. She also runs media training and writing skills workshops, and is the author of A Perfect Press Release – or Not?, a guide to writing and distributing effective press releases, an electronic version of which can be downloaded free from her website: www.jennigay.co.za.

Video conferencing is becoming more viable as the technology improves and bandwidth becomes more affordable. In the early days companies had to install expensive video equipment in their boardrooms, IT staff had to set it up, interoperability between multiple parties was a problem, quality was inconsistent, and it required the use of a dedicated line at a per-minute cost.

But today, businesses can do video conferencing over the internet at a reasonable cost, either by installing the technology themselves or using it on a pay-per-use or prepaid basis, over the internet, and there are plenty of options available. “Skype for Business still works over the public internet, but it provides higher quality video conferencing than the consumer Skype service,” says Wayne Speechly, executive for communications at Internet Solutions.

He says users can connect to the service with a 512 kilobits per second connection, and the Skype server gives them priority over consumer users. Then there is Microsoft’s corporate OCS offering, which can be implemented in-house or used on a hosted basis through a service provider.

Polycom and Tandberg also provide boardroom and executive desktop video conferencing solutions that are designed specifically for this application, says Speechly.  “Having a range of options like this to choose from is great, but it also presents challenges when multiple parties are interacting with each other using different technologies.”

He says to address this issue Internet Solutions has developed Hosted Video Exchange, a service that allows multiple parties using different types of video conferencing to interconnect on a pay per use or subscription basis. Users can also access the IS WebEx hosted video conferencing service and hosted training centre through the exchange, says Speechly.

He says the hosted WebEx service costs R455 a month for the software licence, which is paid by the person or company hosting the conferencing session, and they can invite multiple parties to participate. The party that is hosting the conference also pays a 10 US cents per minute rate for the duration of the session per participant, and each participant pays for their own bandwidth.

Craig Watson, MD of Q-Distribution says hosted video conferencing services are ideal for smaller companies that have 10 to 20 employees that need to communicate on an ad hoc basis across different branches and with customers. He says the Vidyo video conferencing solution costs R5 per minute per user, plus the bandwidth, on a hosted basis, which is viable for small amounts of usage and is cheaper than flying people around.

“But for multiple meetings of a lengthy duration it is more cost effective to install the system in-house.” For 10 concurrent users this would involve a one-off cost of R100,000 for the hardware and software, or R4,000 to R5,000 a month.

“It used to cost R500,000 or more for a boardroom conferencing system, and one of these had to be installed at each location to communicate between branches.” He says to achieve a good quality conferencing experience requires a minimum four megabit per second connection.

Participants also need to be equipped with a good quality webcam, which most of the latest laptops have. “If not, they will need to buy a good quality external webcam, which will cost about R300,” says Watson.

For a good audio quality experience, users also need a headset or external speaker.  “The internal microphone and speaker do not work well together, which causes feedback,” he says.

Companies can use a hosted service on a pay per use basis for a few months to test whether it is sufficient for their needs before looking to install a system in-house, says Watson.

Jennigay Coetzer is a freelance business and technology journalist and she writes regularly for Business Day. She also runs media training and writing skills workshops, and is the author of A Perfect Press Release – or Not?, a guide to writing and distributing effective press releases, an electronic version of which can be downloaded free from her website: www.jennigay.co.za.

Undersea cables have been in existence for many years, more recently for fibre optics and before that for telephone cables. There about 17 major transatlantic undersea cables linking Europe and the US, with three more serving sub-level routes.

There are also about 16 transpacific cables linking Asia with North America, and some six running up the east and west coasts of Africa, according to Thylan Chetty, West African Cable System (WACS) specialist at Infraco, which is a shareholder in the cable.  Chetty is also the procurement group chairman for WACS.

He says, traditionally, most of the data traffic carried by the Asia to US cables was bound for overseas destinations, but they are increasingly being used to carry data within Asia to support regional economic activity. “The same will happen in Africa.”

Chetty says one of the major challenges with undersea cables is the stringent environmental legislation that has been introduced in South Africa and many other African countries. “There are processes that have to be followed involving local authorities and communities in the relevant countries and sometimes a fee.”

He says landing an undersea cable involves digging a trench in the beach to a manhole, but it is a passive cable that does not contain any fluid. “But from an environmental perspective an undersea cable is classed in the same category as a nuclear power station.”

Telkom is a shareholder in SAT3/WASC/SAFE, the East African Submarine Cable System (EASSy), and the West African Cable System (WACS), which is expected go live in the first quarter of next year. Johan Meyer, Telkom’s executive for global capacity says having access to three undersea cables locally improves reliability and availability.

“It can take five days to three weeks to repair a break in a cable.” Further afield, Telkom also has stakes in The European India Gateway (EIG) cable, which links Europe, Middle East, North Africa and India, the Columbus III cable, which links Portugal and Spain with the US, and the SEA-ME-WE 3 or South-East Asia – Middle East – Western Europe 3 cable.

The 39,000 kilometre SEA-ME-WE 3 undersea cable is the longest in the world, stretching from north Germany to Australia to Japan. Meyer says undersea cables are robust and suppliers typically warrant for them not to have more than two technical failures during their lifespan.

When the depth of the water is less than 1.5 kilometres, undersea cables are vulnerable to fishing trawlers and at depths of 60 to 100 metres they are vulnerable to anchoring activity. “In the early days shark bites were also found in cables at 1.5 kilometre depths,” says Meyer.

He says it was thought that the sharks were attracted by the electro magnetic waves emitted by the cables. So the owners fitted screening over their cables at those depths. But this is now done during the manufacturing process because it is known at what point the cable will reach those depths, says Meyer.

He says other cable vulnerabilities include earthquakes. In 2006, an earthquake in the Pacific, close to Taiwan, damaged five undersea cables in 30 places and the last Japan earthquake took out four.

Meyer says a single undersea cable provides the equivalent capacity to that of all the satellites put together globally. “In this era of broadband communication, those countries without access to undersea cables will be left behind,” he says.

Today, most African countries have access to undersea cables or are in the advanced stages of accessing them through terrestrial links, says Meyer.

Jennigay Coetzer is a freelance business and technology journalist and she writes regularly for Business Day. She also runs media training and writing skills workshops, and is the author of A Perfect Press Release – or Not?, a guide to writing and distributing effective press releases, an electronic version of which can be downloaded free from her website: www.jennigay.co.za.

Sales of e-book readers have escalated over the past year and online bookstores report that the demand for e-books is souring. In May this year, Amazon announced that sales of e-books for use on its Kindle e-book reader device had exceeded sales of conventional print books.

“We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly,” says Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO, Amazon.com. He says Amazon has been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle e-books for less than four years.

Recent research by IHS iSuppli indicates that the growing popularity of e-readers has sent the book publishing industry into a long-term decline.“The industry has entered a phase of  disruption that will be as significant as the major changes impacting the music and movie businesses,”  says Steve Mather, principal analyst for wireless, at IHS.

He says supplier shipments of e-book readers, also known as e-readers, are expected to more than triple from 2010 to 2014. But e-readers are under threat from the encroachment of media tablets, which many consumers will use to view e-books.

Over the past 18 months e-reader manufacturers have cut their prices to the point where they are earning near-zero margins. These devices are therefore unlikely to get much cheaper, says Mather.

Research company In-Stat says in a recent report that e-readers still offer the truest reading experience and appeal most to avid readers. But a broader market of consumers want the next mobile device they buy to have multimedia functionality, like web browsing, video, and gaming.

Tablets, like the Apple iPad, are optimised to deliver this kind of multifunction experience, and therefore, represent a stronger opportunity for suppliers and manufacturers alike, it says. The company predicts that shipment volumes of tablets will outpace that of e-readers by the end of this year.

“In fact, e-reader manufacturers will soon begin adding tablet-like devices to their lineups in order to take advantage of the tablet frenzy,” says senior In-stat analyst Stephanie Ethier. She says book seller Barnes & Noble already offers the Color Nook, which is often compared to a tablet.

Google’s iriver Story high definition e-reader recently went on sale in the USA at a recommended retail price of just under $140 and is bound to eventually make its way to SA. The device comes with a high-resolution e-ink screen and a full keyboard and includes wireless access to hundreds of thousands of Google e-books to purchase and more than 3-million for free.

South African online retailer Kalahari.net sells e-book readers and tablet PCs and offers more than 300,000 ebook titles. The company’s head of merchandising, Caroline Nixon, says most e-book readers support printed material that is published in PDF format, and incorporate Epub technology, which allows the flow of text to adjust to the size of the screen of the device.

“With PDF, the text sometimes flows off the screen.” She says, most e-books are now available in both ePub and PDF format.

Kalahari.net has developed a freely downloadable software application that can open both ePub and PDF e-books on e-reader devices, regardless of whether they are protected or not protected. It also provides free applications that allow eBooks purchased from Kalahari.net in ePub or PDF format to be read on an iPad or any Android based tablet device, and provides a similar user experience to that of an e-book reader.

Nixon says free software can also be accessed that allows e-books from any source to be read on a Windows based PC or Apple Mac in e-reader quality. She says iPad users can have a library box on Kalahari.net where they can store all the ebooks they have purchased and access them when they want to read them.

Jennigay Coetzer is a freelance business and technology journalist and she writes regularly for Business Day. She also runs media training and writing skills workshops, and is the author of A Perfect Press Release – or Not?, a guide to writing and distributing effective press releases, an electronic version of which can be downloaded free from her website: www.jennigay.co.za.

Some 100 registered wireless access service providers across South Africa are providing wireless connectivity services in urban and rural areas where other broadband infrastructure is inadequate or non-existent.

They are doing this by using the unlicensed 2.4 and 5.8 spectrum frequencies, which provide speeds up to 100 megabits a second, and linking to other infrastructure providers over longer distances. These entrepreneurial companies provide a varying range of coverage and offer telephony and internet services that in some cases are as much as 40% cheaper than any alternative.

They also often come to the rescue when businesses and consumers find their wired services cut off due to copper cable theft. For years many wireless access providers operated under the radar, until the regulations changed in 2007 and service providers were allowed to apply for a licence to set up their own infrastructure.

Today, collectively, wireless access providers represent the biggest competition to the major service providers and operators, says Steve Akester, CEO of Vlocity. “The mobile operators will not allow us to use their towers.”

Vlocity started setting up wireless networks in the Cape Town area in 2004 to provide services to businesses and consumers that needed immediate connectivity. One of its first customers was a pizza restaurant chain that wanted to broadcast video across 10 outlets and had battled to do it with ADSL.

“It was more difficult to get ADSL connections seven years ago,” says Akester. Since then Vlocity has set up wireless networks that provide last mile connectivity in five of the major provinces, and it is currently setting up networks in Kimberly and Bloemfontein to complete its national coverage.

The company uses Dark Fibre Africa and Neotel’s fibre infrastructure for it’s inter- provincial links and interconnects with ISPs and operators through internet exchanges like Teraco and Africa Internet Exchange. “Our customers can link to each other across the country without leaving our network,” says Akester.

He says much of the company’s infrastructure is in rural areas where there is little or no infrastructure. This includes a network that reaches from Uppington to Kimberly along the Orange River and runs on solar power.

Johan Kruger started Safricom Telecommunications in Potchefstroom in 2006 to provide wireless internet services for farms, small businesses, and university students in the area.
“We cover 80% of the area reaching as far as Randfontein, Westonaria, Carletonville, and Fochville, and we have about 1000 installations.”

The company has also set up wireless hotspots in Potchefstroom for students, which consist of 150 access points that provide coverage over a two square kilometre radius. “Our network also connects to the North West University campus’ network in Potchefstroom allowing students to roam between the two,” says Kruger.
He says Safricom is also providing wireless access to hotels and guest houses in the area, where a lot of European athletes stay when they come to train. “Potchefstroom has very good sporting facilities and a high altitude, which is good for training.”

The company also provided wireless infrastructure for the TV stations to broadcast the World Cup coverage in the area, says Kruger. Further afield, in Phalaborwa, in 2009, Eric Simpson and Emile van Rooyen set up BushGuru, which provides wireless connectivity to the town and surrounding areas, where there is a major problem with copper theft.

“The copper lines have been stolen so many times in this area that Telkom will not replace them any more and it is not cost effective to put in fibre,” says BushGuru director Kerry Simpson. This is a problem, because with the Phalaborwa gate to the Kruger park on the doorstep, the area attracts a lot of tourists who expect to be able to connect to the internet during their stay.

“A lot of the game lodges in and around the park do not get a cellular signal, so there is no 3G coverage.” She says the company provides Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony services over a wireless network that runs on the unlicensed 2.4 and 5.8 gigahertz frequency spectrum.

Customers wanting phone and internet services that have had their fixed line stolen can keep their existing Telkom number and connect to BushGuru wirelessly. “We route calls and data to them over the wireless network for a small monthly fee.”

Jennigay Coetzer is a freelance business and technology journalist and she writes regularly for Business Day. She also runs media training and writing skills workshops, and is the author of A Perfect Press Release – or Not?, a guide to writing and distributing effective press releases, an electronic version of which can be downloaded free from her website: www.jennigay.co.za.

A lot of fibre infrastructure has been been built in metropolitan areas over the past couple of years in South Africa, but it is expensive for service providers to connect customers to it. Some ISPs are leasing infrastructure from Dark Fibre Africa, which lays the cable in its ducting and the service providers light it up and use it to provide services.

But, it can cost more to build a fibre extension to deliver a service to customers’ premises than they can afford or are willing to pay, says Stuart Hardy, MD of Africa Independent Network Exchange. On top of this, lead times for a fibre connection can be as much as a year.

So ISPs are opting to use Neotel’s fibre infrastructure to connect to customers over the last mile or extending their fibre networks with a wireless connection. He says fibre infrastructure needs to be developed further before it will be possible to connect large numbers of customers to it.

Until then wireless, Diginet leased lines and microwave will continue to play an important role, although the need for it will decrease every year in urban areas. He says infrastructure sharing would provide better margins and lower the cost to the customer, but service providers tend to view owning their own infrastructure as a competitive differentiator.

“But the customer does not care who owns the infrastructure,” says Hardy. Craig Holmes, communications and utilities lead for Middle East and Africa at IBM says there are a lot of different players building telecommunication infrastructure, but they are all working in isolation.

He says a lot of telecommunication infrastructure could be shared, as is happening in other countries. “But in SA the mindset of the operators is still to own their own infrastructure.”

IBM provided the infrastructure that supported the scoring, statistics and website transmission of the recent Wimbledon Tournament using high-speed fibre on a on-demand basis. This involved dynamically provisioning systems capability as and when needed from its global data centres.

He says the infrastructure to do this exists in South Africa to do this, but connecting customers to it is a challenge. The regulator Icasa is pushing to unbundle the local loop, which will open up Telkom’s last mile infrastructure to other market players, and is in the final stages of deciding how to do this, says Holmes.

This regulatory process allows multiple licensed operators and service providers to share and provide services over the physical wire connection between the local telephone exchange and the customer, which is known as the local loop. This has already happened in many parts of the world.

Infrastructure sharing is also gaining momentum among the mobile operators and specialist companies are emerging that will take over and manage base stations and let out space to multiple market players. Ten years ago, the number of base stations a mobile operator owned was important, because coverage was a market differentiator.

“So you get competing towers right next to each other,” says Keith Boyd, sales and marketing director at Eaton Towers. He says owning towers is costly in terms of maintenance and running costs, and gives rise to environmental issues.

“If multiple operators share a tower they will only use two or three litres of diesel per hour between them instead of per operator.” He says 90% of mobile towers in Africa are reliant on generators for power.

In India, cellular calls cost three to four cents a minute, due to the economies of scale that have been achieved, and tower sharing has been a significant contributing factor. Locally, American Towers recently purchased Cell C’s 1,300 towers and committed to funding more in the future.

Cell C subsequently dropped its data prices and Vodacom reacted by doing the same.
As prices come down, users will consume more data capacity, creating more demand and the need for more towers. The next generation Long Term Evolution (LTE) 4G mobile technology will also require more towers.

So the operators have to find ways to reduce costs, and tower sharing reduces capital expenditure. In other parts of Africa, Nigerian operators have been sharing towers for the longest through Helios, a local tower company that builds them and lets out space on them.

Tower sharing is also going on in Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, DRC, and Ghana. In Ghana, Eaton Towers provides power and security for towers it manages for Vodafone, which are shared by MTN, Airtel, Vodafone, Tigo (Millicom) and others in Ghana.

“This reflects the willingness of operators to share.” He says operators also sometimes swap tower space between them on a more informal basis.

Jennigay Coetzer is a freelance business and technology journalist and she writes regularly for Business Day. She also runs media training and writing skills workshops, and is the author of A Perfect Press Release – or Not?, a guide to writing and distributing effective press releases, an electronic version of which can be downloaded free from her website: www.jennigay.co.za.

Companies will need to optimise their internal networks if they want to benefit from the increased bandwidth capacity that will become available as a result of all the broadband infrastructure that is being built. “A lot of company networks are old and need upgrading,” says Mark van Vuuren, MD of TeleSciences.

If this is not done the bottleneck will move to the local area network. “It is no good having a 100 megabit per second connection to an ISP if the LAN is inefficient,” he says.

This will become increasingly important as companies opt to use cloud services, such as having applications hosted by a service provider. It will also be difficult to implement video conferencing if the internal network is inefficient, says van Vuuren.

He says with the growing demand for employees to work from anywhere, companies also need to ensure they can accommodate this without compromising the security of the corporate network. “Traditional wired LANs also need to morph into wireless LANs, so users can move around with their mobile devices and stay connected.”

Van Vuuren says 80% of large companies are still predominantly running wired networks, with perhaps a few wireless access points in the boardroom, canteen, reception, and other common areas. Some of the other 20%, and many smaller companies, are running completely wireless networks.

“Wi-Fi networks now provide the speed and efficiency to do this,” says van Vuuren. He says the problem with fixed networks is that when offices are reorganised and employees move around network access points are left vacant and new ones are installed.

Companies should do an audit of the access points and cabling that is no longer being used and clean them up, says van Vuuren. “Access points that are not in use, but are connected to a network switch still draw power.”

He says the latest network switches will power down when not in use. An audit of the network and user behaviour will enable companies to decide on the mix of wired and wireless network infrastructure they should have.

Policies and procedures will need to be implemented to ensure that any wireless networks that are installed cannot be accessed by unauthorised users. Companies will also need to ensure that users can remain connected to the network as they move between access points, says van Vuuren.

This can be a problem with access points that are old or are based on different standards. “The latest access points cater for handover as users move around,” he says.

Alternatively management systems are available that cater for all standards and address this problem. Technology tools are also available that will load balance the network traffic to ensure the best performance and will reroute traffic if an access point goes down, says van Vuuren.

Jennigay Coetzer is a freelance business and technology journalist and she writes regularly for Business Day. She also runs media training and writing skills workshops, and is the author of A Perfect Press Release – or Not?, a guide to writing and distributing effective press releases, an electronic version of which can be downloaded free from her website: www.jennigay.co.za.

Satellite is becoming an increasingly viable contender as a broadband communication technology and its global footprint extends way beyond that of any other. Estimates of the number of man-made satellites operating within Earth’s orbit vary from 2100 to 3,000, and some 50 are positioned over Africa, providing almost 100% coverage.

Satellite has been a key communication solution for many years in Africa, mainly for television broadcast and connectivity from the continent to Europe and beyond. It has filled the void in areas where fixed line and mobile communication is lacking, it is used for alternative routing, mobile operators use it for their backhaul transmission networks, and it is becoming an increasingly viable option for broadband connectivity.

Today consumers want to watch movies, make Voice over IP phone calls, and browse the internet, all at the same time, and the latest satellite technology supports this, says Soheil Mehrabanzad, assistant vice president for Middle East and Africa at Hughes Network Systems. “Good quality video conferencing is viable over 384 kilobits per second (kbps) bandwidth using satellite broadband.”

Advances in technology and compression techniques have helped to boost satellite throughput speeds from a maximum of 768 Kbps five years ago to up to 9 megabits per second today on the user’s inbound channel. The next generation higher throughput satellites, which incorporate spot-beam technology and operate in the higher frequency Ka-band spectrum, have been seen to provide up to 15 Mbps inbound user throughput and allow the use of smaller satellite receiver dishes.

“We have a Ka-band satellite, Spaceway 3, positioned over North America and will be launching another one, Jupiter, in North America in 2012,” says Mehrabanzad. He says Hughes is  also supplying its high-performance Ka-band broadband satellite system and terminals for the ground segment of the Yahsat 1B satellite, which is scheduled to be launched towards the end of 2011 and will be positioned over Africa.

Jonathan Osler, MD for Africa sales at Intelsat says the opening up of the Ka-band spectrum will provide more capacity for new satellite operators to file for rights to operate on this frequency. Intelsat currently has 54 satellites in the sky globally, and 22 of these are positioned over Africa.

“The latest of these is the New Dawn satellite, which we launched last month and we will be launching four more by mid-2012,” he says. New Dawn is a joint venture between Intelsat and the Convergence Partners consortium and is 90% funded from African sources.

The satellite operates on the C-band and Ku-band spectrum and is optimised to deliver wireless backhaul, broadband and media content. Dawie de Wet, CEO of Q-Kon, says satellite is often the only option for long distance and last mile connectivity in areas where other services do not reach or are inadequate or, in the case of the South African market, if a fixed line connection is down due to copper theft.

“Even in the US, satellite broadband is often used on the fringes of metropolitan areas where the fibre, ADSL or 3G infrastructure is lacking,” says de Wet. A satellite connection can be up and running in 48 hours, and there is coverage everywhere.

He says the 445,000 registered small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that exist in SA are a good target market for a broadband satellite service, which costs about R700 a month for a 4 Mbps download rate and 256 Kbps upload rate, plus a one-time cost of R6,000 for the receiver dish.

Q-Kon recently formed Skyvine, a joint venture with electronic products manufacturer Ellies, to provide satellite broadband services to SMEs and high-end consumers through retailers, satellite TV installers and ISPs.

Jennigay Coetzer is a freelance business and technology journalist and she writes regularly for Business Day. She also runs media training and writing skills workshops, and is the author of A Perfect Press Release – or Not?, a guide to writing and distributing effective press releases, an electronic version of which can be downloaded free from her website: www.jennigay.co.za.

There is a lot of activity going on across the country to build high-speed metropolitan and national broadband infrastructure to join up with the undersea cables that are landing along the coast.

The latest long distance link to be completed is Dark Fibre Africa’ terrestrial fibre link that runs between Johannesburg, Pretoria and Vereniging in Gauteng to Durban in Kwazulu-Natal and links up with the undersea cables landing in Mtunzini. It also connects to the Teraco internet hubs in Isando and Durban, which Seacom and all the first tier ISPs are connected to.

“Vodacom is already using the link and Seacom is installing equipment to enable it to do so,” says CEO Gustav Smit. Dark Fibre Africa is also building a fibre link between Cape Town and Yzerfontein, where the West African Cable System (WACS) undersea cable recently landed, and this is expected to be completed by October.

The company already has a fibre link between Cape Town and nearby Melkbosstrand, which is the landing point for the South Africa-Far East cable systems (Sat-2 and Sat-3). However, its plans to build a link between Cape Town and Johannesburg have been put on hold, because the Neotel, MTN, Vodacom consortium has already commenced building along this route and newcomer FibreCo has also announced plans to do so.

“We would rather build somewhere else than duplicate.” He says depending on what other players are doing, the next possibility is a link between Durban and Cape Town, which would involve 2000 kilometres of cable infrastructure and would take two to three years to build.

But the company’s main focus is on building metropolitan networks. “We have laid a total of 2,798 kilometres of metropolitan fibre infrastructure within Gauteng, western Cape and Durban.”

In Gauteng, this has brought fibre to within 1.5 kilometres of all businesses in the area. “We will build fibre connections on request for specific companies or service providers over the last 1.5 kilometres to the customer’s premises,” says Smit.

Udesh Ramkhelawan, executive for wholesale marketing at Telkom says Telkom has laid a total of 143,000 kilometres of fibre cable across the country to date and is continuing to roll out more as part of its normal network expansion. “All the metropolitan centres are linked into our national fibre ring network.”

He says the focus of this rollout is mainly in urban areas where there is the greatest demand for high-speed data services. One of the major challenges with any type of wired connection is that the cable is vulnerable to theft, and the thieves do not differentiate between copper wire, which has a resale value and fibre, which does not.

For consumers and businesses that cannot justify a fibre link, most Telkom exchanges across the country support ADSL. But the availability of the service to consumers and businesses depends on how far they are located from the nearest exchange and the quality of the copper cable between them and the exchange, says Ramkhelawan.

Rowen Chetty, director of local government and industry for vertical markets for Sub-Saharan Africa at Ericsson says there is not enough broadband infrastructure to support the numerous ISPs that are in the market, especially over the so called last mile connection between them and their customers. “Those holding ECNS licenses can build their own infrastructure, but few ISPs can afford to do it.”

This is where the municipalities can play a role, by building fibre infrastructure for their own needs and using their excess capacity to offer low cost bandwidth to ISPs, says Chetty. He says most of the metropolitan municipalities have embarked on or are planning projects to do this, and even the smaller ones are looking at it.

Apart from supporting their own connectivity needs, this will help them to stimulate business in their communities by selling excess capacity to ISPs. Locally, Ericsson is helping Johannesburg City Council to create a metropolitan fibre ring network that covers 900 kilometres, including under-serviced areas, and connects to the Seacom cable in Midrand.

“This is a three year project and we have already laid 350 kilometres of cabling for the core network,” says Chetty. He says the network will connect municipal offices, clinics and hospitals and allow the municipality to communicate with citizens through internet-enabled devices and communication centres.

“It will be the ISPs that will provide the final connectivity to the users.” The R1.4-billion network will be funded by Ericsson, which will operate it for 15 years through a company it has set up called Bwired and then hand it over to the municipality at no cost as a going concern.

Jennigay Coetzer is a freelance business and technology journalist and she writes regularly for Business Day. She also runs media training and writing skills workshops, and is the author of A Perfect Press Release – or Not?, a guide to writing and distributing effective press releases, an electronic version of which can be downloaded free from her website: www.jennigay.co.za.

World Telecommunications and Information Society Day marks the anniversary of the signing of the first international telegraph convention and the creation of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in 1865. The ITU’s mission is to connect the world and fulfill everyone’s fundamental right to communicate.

Every time someone makes a phone call, sends a fax or receives an e-mail, travels on a plane or a ship, listens to the radio or watches television, they benefit from the universal IT and telecommunications frameworks put in place by the ITU.

It also regulates worldwide use of the radio-frequency spectrum, ensuring all international wireless communications remain interference-free, and advises on development policies, regulatory frameworks and strategies. The theme of this year’s World Communications and Information Society Day is Better life in Rural Communities with Information and Communication technologies (ICT).

Half the world’s population resides in under-serviced rural districts and far flung communities and this translates into three billion people that are benefiting least from the use of IT and telecommunication. South Africa has a seat on the ITU Council, which allows the Department of Communications, the regulator Icasa and other government agencies to put forward a collective view of telecommunications agendas across the continent.

As a member of the council the government is playing its part in celebrating World Telecommunications and Information Society Day with the launch of several projects over the past week that are aimed at promoting connectivity in rural areas. These include the setting up of computer centres at the Maphaphoma primary school in Nongoma, KwaZulu Natal and the Mzingwezwi High school in Ndwedwe, KwaZulu Natal.

The centres are equipped with 20 computers that have multimedia screens and a network server that are connected to the internet. Communications Minister Roy Padayachie says these projects are a joint effort between government agencies, and the private sector companies that are providing the funding.

In addition, the Department of Communications is funding a multimedia communications centre at Impendle near Pietermaritzburg, which is equipped with about 20 PCs and internet connectivity and will serve as an ICT training centre for the community. It is also launching a project in Msinga in Northern KwaZulu Natal in conjunction with the SABC to provide television broadcast to the community for the first time, says Padayachie.

“The community has never had television services before,” he says. A pilot project is also on the go to install a cellular network in Msinga and surrounding areas to provide internet connectivity to 137 schools, a clinic, a hospital, and the local magistrate’s court.

“If it is successful this will provide a model that can be used as a basis for rolling out similar services in other rural communities,” says Padayachie. The Msinga project is a joint effort between the Department of Communications, Icasa, Sentech, the Universal Service Agency (USAASA) and a local telecommunications service provider.

Rolling out connectivity services in rural areas is a huge job that needs to involve both the public and private sector. “We are currently defining what role the public sector should be playing in this regard.”

He says times are changing and cellular operators and other telecommunications sector players are seriously eying connectivity opportunities in rural areas. “They are asking for more spectrum to do this, but they need to meet the regulator’s requirements first.”

The Department of Communications recently attended a summit meeting with top ICT companies and established a committee to address broadband communication issues and opportunities and the outcome was very positive, says Padayachie. He says he is aware that South Africa is slipping behind other African countries with broadband communication and that this needs to be addressed.

Obed Bapela, Deputy Minister of Communications says the Department of Communications is planning to take a more integrated approach to assisting with the development of broadband infrastructure in rural communities. In the past, different departments have approached this in their own way, resulting in isolated projects.

For example, some municipalities have been setting up networks to service their own communities. Bapela says there is a need to orchestrate all the initiatives that are being undertaken.

The department is also looking at ways to encourage people living in rural communities to develop an interest in computer literacy so they can use devices like smartphones to communicate and access the internet. “Smartphones are the ideal device for the majority of South Africans to access the internet.”

He says once people learn the basics they will want to explore further, as happened when people first started using ATMs to draw money. An organisation called Village Telco, in which the Shuttleworth Foundation has a 30% stake is running pilot projects for rolling out Wi-Fi networks in rural areas to provide low cost telephone services to under-serviced communities.

“Wireless access points are installed in each household and residents can plug in a conventional telephone and communicate with each other at no cost,” says founder Steve Song. He says a network of these Mesh Potato access points these can be connected to any other network.

This means the community where the Mesh Potato network is installed can also have access to low cost internet and long distance Voice over IP (VoIP) calls. “Only one access point needs to be connected to the nearest point of presence (PoP) to provide internet access,” says Song.

This PoP could be a commercial service provider or even a local farm that has an ADSL connection.

Jennigay Coetzer is a freelance business and technology journalist and she writes regularly for Business Day. She also runs media training and writing skills workshops, and is the author of A Perfect Press Release – or Not?, a guide to writing and distributing effective press releases, an electronic version of which can be downloaded free from her website: www.jennigay.co.za.

Half of the undersea cables that were planned to land along the east and west coasts of Africa by 2012 have done so. The latest is the West African Cable System (WACS), which landed in Yzerfontein in the Western Cape in April, is expected to start operating in the first quarter of 2012.

Thylan Chetty, procurement group chairman for WACS says ninety percent of the cable has been laid from Cape Town to Portugal, with additional landing points in Namibia, Angola, DRC, Congo Brazzaville, Cameroon, Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Cote de Voire, Cape Verde, and Canary Islands.

He says WACS will also join up with an undersea cable owned by Tata Communications, which will provide an ongoing link from Portugal to the UK. “We are also entering an agreement to lease terrestrial fibre infrastructure from the Tata UK landing point to an internet exchange in London.”

Chetty says these links will be in place when the WACS cable goes live. In the interim, terrestrial fibre cable and equipment still need to be installed and tested at the landing points.

“We have a team that does two or three of these at a time, and has already completed a few,” he says. The Seacom undersea cable system, which went live in July 2009 connects the east cost of Africa from Mtunzini in SA to India and Europe, with landing points in various African countries on the way.

This includes Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and northern Zambia through Tanzania and Malawi. The African Coast to Europe (ACE) cable, which will link SA to France, is scheduled to land at Yzerfontein, western Cape in the third quarter of 2012, with additional landing points in some 20 African countries along the west coast.

This is in addition to Glo1 and MainOne, which landed on the west coast of Africa in the third quarter of 2010. Glo1 links Nigeria and Ghana to Portugal, Spain and the UK, with landing points in Portugal, Ghana, Senegal and other countries on the way.

MainOne links Nigeria, Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal and Portugal, with onward links to Europe, Asia and the US and a possibility of eventually landing in SA. Then there is The East African Cable System (TEAMS), which went live in June 2009 and  links Kenya to the United Arab Emirates.

“I would have bet on at least one of these cable projects not happening,” says Steve Song, former fellow of the Shuttleworth Foundation, who tracks the progress of undersea cable landings on his website, manypossibilities.net.

Another undersea cable to be recently announced is the South Atlantic Express (SAex) cable system, which is expected to run from Mtunzini in South Africa to Angola to Brazil, and onwards to the US and is expected to be finished by June 2013. SAex is designed to provide 12.8 terabits per second capacity, which is 10 times the capacity of Seacom, if all the fibre strands were lit up, says Song.

Another that is expected to benefit Africa is the India-Middle East-Western Europe (I-ME-WE) cable, which links India with France and has been operational since 2009. “I-ME-WE will provide onward passage for cables such as TEAMS, EASy and probably Seacom as well,” says Song. Then there is the recently announced Seychelles East Africa System (SEAS) cable, which will link the Seychelles with Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania, and is also expected to link up to EASSy and Seacom.

Jennigay Coetzer is a freelance business and technology journalist and she writes regularly for Business Day. She also runs media training and writing skills workshops, and is the author of A Perfect Press Release – or Not?, a guide to writing and distributing effective press releases, an electronic version of which can be downloaded free from her website: www.jennigay.co.za.

Several major terrestrial fibre infrastructure initiatives are on the go throughout SA, including the one being built by the Neotel, MTN, Vodacom consortium. But until these are completed the only two national networks are those of Telkom and Broadband Infraco.

Infraco’s network, which is used by Neotel, extends across railway lines and power lines and is linked to all the undersea cables that have landed on the western Cape and Kwazulu-Natal coasts. “We are in the process of building alternative links to Seacom and EASSy from Pietermaritzburg,” says CEO Andrew Shaw.

He says Infraco has also established links to the borders of Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Namibia, which provide access to multiple undersea cables. It also gives South African based companies fast online access to business contacts in these countries through service providers that use the network.

He says the combination of Infraco’s terrestrial network and its links to multiple undersea cables also gives it the ability to cross-link data traffic from east coast to west coast. For example data traffic originating from a country on the west coast of Africa can be routed from an undersea cable on that side, across SA and onto an undersea cable on the east coast on its way to south east Asia.

Infraco is government owned and its business model is to sell bandwidth capacity to operators and service providers on a wholesale basis at affordable prices to facilitate broader penetration of broadband connectivity. A key part of its mandate is to roll out more fibre cables to under serviced rural areas.

“We already have some fibre cable going through rural areas along the railway lines and power lines,” says Shaw. He says Infraco is currently partnering with commercial cellular operators to roll out voice and internet services in rural areas across the country within the next few months.

Plans are also afoot to work with Sentech, which has a similar mandate, to provide long distance infrastructure to support connectivity in schools and healthcare using a combination of technologies. “We also intend partnering with the provinces and service providers to establish infrastructure in under serviced areas.”

One of the latest players planning to build a national backbone fibre network is FibreCo Telecommunications, a joint venture between Internet Solutions, Cell C, and Convergence. FibreCo CEO Arif Hussain says the vision and scope of the planned fibre rollout is extensive, initially starting at 4,500 kilometres and extending to 12 to 14,000 kilometres over the next four to five years.

He says the initial rollout will be from Johannesburg to Cape Town to Durban, linking up with the undersea cable landing points within two years. “The linkup with the undersea cables on the west coast is crucial.”

The company plans to sell fibre strands to customers on an open access basis linked to a managed service. Fibre strands will be sold on an unfettered rights basis, whereby customers pay upfront for the right to use them for the life of the fibre.

“The estimated lifespan of optic fibre is 20 years,” says Hussain. He says Fibreco’s development strategy is to build much of the infrastructure itself, including digging up roads and laying the ducting and fibre, but it will also form alliances to share infrastructure where it makes sense to do so.

“Another option is to swap the use of infrastructure with other players,” says Hussain. He says the company has completed the planning and environmental studies and is expecting to award the tender for the first phase of the project within the next few months. “We believe out network will make a major contribution to the national broadband capacity, which is way behind the rest of the world.”

Jennigay Coetzer is a freelance business and technology journalist and she writes regularly for Business Day. She also runs media training and writing skills workshops, and is the author of A Perfect Press Release – or Not?, a guide to writing and distributing effective press releases, an electronic version of which can be downloaded free from her website: www.jennigay.co.za.

A major imperative throughout Africa is the building the terrestrial network infrastructure to connect to the various landing points of the undersea cables that have landed on the east and west coasts. “The Tanzanian government has built a terrestrial fibre network ring around its borders and is working on connecting this to Seacom in Dar Es Salem,” says Seacom CEO Brian Herlihy.

He says work is also in progress to build terrestrial networks to connect landlocked Botswana and Zimbabwe to Seacom from South Africa and Mozambique. “In Mozambique the government owned telecommunications operator TDM has built a network that reaches the Zimbabwe border.”

In Zimbabwe, multiple infrastructure providers are also building terrestrial networks to reach the borders of Mozambique and South Africa. Botswana and Namibia are already connected to Seacom through Broadband Infraco’s fibre network, which reaches those countries, says Herlihy.

“We have counted $6 billion of investment in terrestrial fibre networks just in East and Southern Africa.” He says Seacom has formed a relationship with MainOne undersea cable operator to connect to Nigeria.

“Going via Europe to MainOne to connect to Nigeria is still faster and cheaper than using satellite.” Herlihy says Seacom is interconnecting with the TEAMS undersea cable in Kenya and is working on doing the same with the EASSy cable in Tanzania.

“This will give us alternative routing.” A lot of discussions are going on to determine how to bring internet content from China and the US into Africa and cache it locally for faster access.

“There is a lot of demand for Chinese content in Africa.” He says Seacom has so much bandwidth it can download the content during off-peak times to a local internet exchange hub, many of which are being set up throughout Africa.

These include Dar Es Salem and Mozambique, and in South Africa there are three or four.
Internet exchanges are usually run by non-profit organisations that are replicating what is what is being done in other countries around the world.

Herlihy says Seacom is acting as a facilitator for new exchanges that are being set up. “We are hosting one of these exchanges in our cable station in Mozambique and it provides a peering hub where ISPs  can cache and share internet content.”

He says Seacom is helping to facilitate the creating of local content that can be cached at this and other exchanges. “The objective is to create an African internet experience.”

With the arrival of multiple undersea cables in Africa, communication has become a lot more affordable and the economies of some African countries are growing a the rate of 5% to 6% a year, says Herlihy. He says over the past decade economic growth on the continent has come from embracing other markets.

But now that African governments are becoming more stable they need to generate growth through worker productivity. “The communications infrastructure will be there to support this,” says Herlihy.

Jennigay Coetzer is a freelance business and technology journalist and she writes regularly for Business Day. She also runs media training and writing skills workshops, and is the author of A Perfect Press Release – or Not?, a guide to writing and distributing effective press releases, an electronic version of which can be downloaded free from her website: www.jennigay.co.za.