Now, both businesses and consumers are able to port their existing fixed line number range to one of the many providers in the market – allowing South Africans further freedom of choice in fixed-line telecommunications. “In future, Telkom does not need to play any role in terminating inbound calls for organisations, and thus there is no need to have any PSTN infrastructure installed into the incumbent operator as both inbound and outbound calls can be facilitated through an alternative provider. That is where the value proposition of alternative voice providers like Internet Solutions really starts to match up,” says Speechly.

The challenge comes in with the infrastructure requirement necessary to provide the same level of service that Telkom currently provides to the market and Speechly warns that these must be addressed upfront to prevent significant challenges later. “Don’t be hasty in migrating to any VoIP provider who happens to be vocal in the market around their ability to port numbers to their infrastructure. There are many considerations that need to be assessed when making a decision, and by and large many of the VoIP providers will only disappoint in the short to medium term,” says Speechly.

Some of the complexities raised include the required capacity to facilitate the inbound calls that would ordinarily come via the PSTN. Many VoIP providers aggregate these inbound calls off a single infrastructure that also carries outbound calls. With inbound call flows now coming via other networks into the respective VoIP provider’s network, there may be inadequate capacity leaving organisation’s external stakeholders unable to reach them.  So thorough capacity planning that monitors concurrent calls, maximum calls, and call flow direction needs to be scoped and agreed to upfront. Says Speechly, “Fortunately, given IS’ highly redundant and dispersed national network; and the large number of existing clients, we have inherent latent capacity that can facilitate inbound calls on a large scale.”
Another key consideration is around disaster recovery.  Many VoIP providers have a single infrastructure with little or insufficient redundancy. In the event that interconnect links go down, an organisation’s inbound number range will be unreachable. It is imperative that organisations select a provider that can prove adequate and sufficient resiliency and redundancy in their network when pursuing a porting offering to the market. “Having the ability to legally port numbers to your network does not mean you have the underlying infrastructure that is going to provide the required level of service. In addition to the capacity consideration, redundancy, resiliency and backbone uptime are of paramount importance,” advises Speechly, “At this point, given market research, it appears that there are only really two alternative providers with the level of redundancy and capacity to provide a best of breed solution on a sustainable infrastructure, one of them is certainly Internet Solutions.”

The last consideration is the lure of handsome revenue rebates for inbound minutes, something which can make for an appealing business case. “Many of the VoIP providers offer significant rebates on every inbound minute via their infrastructure. Don’t forget that this rebate is paid for by the caller phoning your number, ultimately leading to higher telecommunications charges. In some instances, certain VoIP providers charge as much as calls to the mobile networks, therefore it is important to do your research upfront. End consumers and other businesses need to ensure that they are not incurring unnecessary charges to call your organisation.” he adds.
The market will certainly benefit from the announcement of GNP. “Internet Solutions has built its network with GNP in mind,” says Speechly. “We can facilitate a number porting strategy that will allow for all your corporate office number ranges to be migrated in a way that is seamless and risk free, taking into account the management of capacity, redundancy and resiliency. With the IS voice infrastructure having matured over the last 5 years, the addition of GNP as a competition enabler allows us to facilitate this inbound traffic without material impact to our existing process, capacity and planning procedures,” he concludes.

For more information around porting your fixed line numbers to Internet Solutions, please mail vois@is.co.za.

If you get a chance you should read his account of his experience dealing with Mr. Delivery – it sounds like it left a really bad taste in the mouth – excuse the pun.

Personally I am quickly getting to the point where I refuse to deal with callcentres – I want to be able to deal with real people with the authority and ability to answer my questions straight away. While call centres may be able to help businesses deal with large numbers of clients, maybe they would be better off focusing on better relationship building.

Post your comments below on your experiences dealing with the Mr. Delivery callcentre.

BCS has big plans. By 2012 it aims to be the largest converged telecommunications provider in Southern Africa, with high-capacity points of presence (PoPs) across the SADC countries, connecting them to its PoPs in South Africa and the UK. BCSgroup has an ECNS license with a national network and, through its partner IBS, has secured access to 20 STM-1 circuits (20×155Mbps) on the Seacom cable. BCS is one of the earliest adopters of long term contracts to secure low cost international bandwidth in the Southern African region.

BCS will offer smaller ISPs access to bandwidth at dramatically lower prices than seen before, from as little as R5500 per month per Mbps international circuit, representing an estimated 80% reduction in their costs from just two years ago.

The choice to colocate at Teraco’s Cape Town vendor neutral data centre is a crucial step in this growth strategy, and BCSgroup will be amongst the first tenants of the Johannesburg data centre when it comes on line in February 2010.

Willie Olivier, managing director of BCSgroup says, “Colocating within Teraco’s vendor neutral facilities was the obvious next step for us. Through our acquisition of circuits on the Seacom cable, BCS is in the position to rapidly grow our wholesale and large enterprise converged solutions business. Retaining BCS’ independence in terms of both the hardware we provide and the network operators we use has always been a critical part of our value offering. As the only genuinely neutral colocation facility in South Africa, Teraco is best placed for us to interconnect with other networks and carriers, from neighbouring African countries and the rest of the world. Their facility presents a perfect launch pad for our expansion.”

From the Teraco data centre facilities, BCS will offer competitively priced Internet bandwidth and private leased line circuits to ISPs and large enterprise customers within South Africa and beyond its borders. In addition, BCS will peer on NAPAfrica – the new neutral network access point that is located in the ‘meet me’ room in Teraco’s data centres – allowing the free exchange of Internet traffic between BCS customers and other service providers colocated at Teraco.

“The BCS expansion strategy has been one of both self provision and partnership, each option weighed up in terms of what makes the most economic sense and how we can provide the best possible value to our customers over the long term. Our partnership with Teraco means that choice means being able to pick from the best as they become available,” says Olivier.

“We are delighted to welcome BCS to join the growing list of carriers and network providers available in Teraco data centres,” says Lex van Wyk, managing director of Teraco. “BCS have found a compelling niche as a regional network and look set to deliver excellent value to some of our other customers.”

About Teraco Data Environments

Founded in 2007, Teraco is South Africa’s first provider of vendor neutral data centres, with an absolute focus on building and operating its data centre facilities in Johannesburg and Cape Town to global best practice. Unrestricted choice of network and service provider allows customers to manage traffic to get better value or performance, and creates an open market for partnerships between customers, networks and service providers. Teraco data centres give customers a technically superior, physically more secure and lower cost environment for their information systems. Strictly enforced access control, uncompromised security, guaranteed power, advanced fire protection, efficient cooling and electrical resiliency throughout ensures hardware availability. As business needs change, resources can be rapidly and flexibly scaled. Leading international investors and Treacle Private Equity, a black owned South African private equity group, back Teraco. The company is a Level 4 contributor (DTI Codes). For more information please visit www.teraco.co.za.

About BCSGroup

With over 30 years experience, BCSgroup is well positioned to be the leading provider of converged technology solutions in Africa, offering a comprehensive range of next-generation services in partnership with top technology vendors. As an ECNS license holder, BCSgroup is able to provide services nationally, through its own office and network infrastructure, and through a number of partnerships. BCSgroup provides customers with a full communication service, including information distribution, access, unified communications, mobile solutions, voice data and content -switching routing and management, solution design, integration services and Telecommunication Expense Management (TEM) that is built on world-class products and technology.

www.teraco.co.za

This sector is a growing sector in South Africa and we are using this blog to discuss news and developments in the sector to help us best understand industry needs.

We look forward to interacting with various role players in the sector and exchanging news and views with industry professionals.

For further information on our corporate wellness offering for the callcentre environment please visit www.rival.co.za or mail sales@rival.co.za

Regards,

Marc Ashton