Ekurhuleni broadband provides ROI

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 06 Mar 2008

The Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality says its wireless and fibre broadband network paid for itself in less than four months.

The East Rand municipality's executive director for ICT, Nilesh Singh, told a recent meeting of the Local Government Business Network the council had spent R9 million on a fibre-optic and WiMAX network linking its operations and offices.

The roll-out allowed the council to can Telkom to whom they had been paying about R4.42 million a month. Singh gave a breakdown of their previous expenditure saying their nine 100Mbps fixed-wire links had cost R2.5 million per month, their 18 54Mbps links had a R1.6 million price tag and their 160 Diginet lines had a R320 000 per month outlay.

Singh says it took six months to install the broadband wireless network and has made the council the owner of the largest Cisco VOIP public sector deployment in SA. The high-availability network can also carry a wide range of data with throughputs of up to 54Mbps.

Backhaul
* 9 x Ceragon 100Mbps point-to-point links
* 18 x Alvarion BreezeNet B 54Mbps point-to-point links

216 Subscriber units installed at
* Pay points
* Clinics
* Fire stations
* Municipal offices

He reminds that Ekurhuleni is home to about 2.5 million people, most of Gauteng's heavy industry and several communications hubs, including OR Tambo International Airport.

Ekurhuleni can now put this network at the disposal of other levels of government and the public. Singh says municipal broadband can become an alternative source of income to municipalities that have previously received much of their revenue from electricity distribution. Under a government plan this function - and income - will be taken from them in the coming few years and be reassigned to a network of regional electricity distributors, known as REDs.

Municipal broadband can also take participative democracy to the next level, Singh says. "It will allow for participation and consultation," he says. City council meetings could be viewed via CCTV and instant polling software would allow the public to give their views on topics - and influence the deliberations.

Forms processing is also made easy and much "red tape" can be cut, Singh averred.