Twelve vendors have responded to the City of Cape Town`s request for information (RFI) on upgrading the Smart Cape Access Network and most were "disappointing", says Nirvesh Sooful, the city`s CIO.
In April, the City of Cape Town issued RFIs that would lead to requests for proposals (RFPs) later this month, to upgrade the connectivity of its Smart Cape Access Network, which connects 100 libraries and 100 clinics, and primarily gives citizens free access to the Internet.
Sooful says the aim is to upgrade the connections to 512KB on lines with 1MB to 2MB capacity.
"We have connections of 64KB at the points and this is costing us R1.6 million per annum to connect the libraries alone," he says, adding while no budget has been determined yet for the upgrade, he expects it to be less than R10 million.
Hype vs delivery
"This is very important for us as a city, as we believe the expenditure can be recouped on the operational cost. It will also be a bit of a test case for when we have to upgrade our total network. For instance, there is also the possibility of adding voice over Internet Protocol functionality on the Smart Cape network later," he says.
Sooful says the disappointment in the RFI responses was companies did not live up to the marketing hype with which they originally pitched.
"Only one response really came out with a creative model that can be said to be a public private partnership model. The rest, essentially, either said `we build, you pay for it`, or `we build and you lease it`," he says.
Sooful says most of the expected big names in telecommunications and networking had responded to the original RFI, including Telkom.
He says the second national operator`s submission was judged by the tender committee to be "non-responsive" as it did not meet certain legal requirements, such as signatures at the bottom of every page.
"We have to follow a very strict tender process as we are dealing with the public`s money," Sooful says.
A formal RFP will be issued later this month.
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