SA's mobile operators have prepared for Eskom's latest bout of planned power outages, but a decline in quality of service is likely should the load shedding periods be extended.
News of the state-owned power utility's load shedding plans last week elicited concern from industries across the board. For the second time this year, Eskom announced that, due to constrained power supply, it would have to force a reduction of electricity use. The situation was exacerbated last weekend, after the collapse of a coal silo at Eskom's Majuba power station in Mpumalanga.
Shortly after Eskom's renewed appeal to consumers and businesses to be frugal in their use of power, and warning that circumstances necessitated rolling blackouts, Telkom issued a statement saying, depending on the duration of the outages, certain of its core network elements could be lost.
The company said it would be on "high alert" and recruit extra manpower during the latest load shedding period.
Although SA's mobile operators did not quantify the financial and operational impact the latest load shedding periods - slots of four-and-a-half hours - are expected to have, they indicated incident backups were in place and these were, for the most part, sufficient to keep services up and running during blackouts.
Sidney Arnold, MTN's GM of network operations, says load shedding will affect MTN's service in certain areas around the country. "MTN SA works tirelessly to ensure there is minimal affect and that its customers continue to receive a quality voice and data experience during these periods of load shedding."
In the event of a power failure, says Arnold, MTN base station sites are powered by batteries for a period of time. However, these will fail if outages are for extended periods, he warns. "In the case of failures being longer than normal and the batteries no longer powering the equipment, MTN endeavours to get generators to important sites to restore service. This, however, cannot be achieved for 100% of the failed sites."
Vodacom spokesperson Richard Boorman says the majority of Vodacom's base stations have battery backups in place. "So as long as the outages are not extended, we don't tend to see a major impact." Depending on the site, backup batteries generally cover periods of four to six hours.
So far, says Boorman, there has not been any significant disruption to the company's operations.
Telkom has appealed to customers to understand that SA - service providers included - is in the midst of "trying circumstances". Marna Wilden, managing executive of Telkom's network centre operations, said last week: "Our business and operations will also be impacted by load shedding and we hope that customers will appreciate that we are doing all that we can to maintain services."
Telkom wishes to highlight that, in an instance of power failure - as a result of load shedding or otherwise - older models of modems do not have built-in functionality that allows the modem to reset itself.
Cell C had not provided comment by the time of publication.
Public enterprise minister Lynne Brown, who visited the Majuba power station over the weekend, said yesterday, regarding the stability of Eskom's fleet of power plants: "While the system is tight, we can stabilise the fleet. However, it will take a concerted effort and time, and I appeal to everyone to be patient. There will be incidents like this but they are rare and, as we have shown, they can be overcome if we all work together."
Business analysts have cited the power crisis as a hindrance to the fruitfulness of SA's economy in general, and to job creation.
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