I-Fusion yesterday launched BidNet, a national network designed for use by its parent company Bidvest to allow for more effective communications between group companies.
[VIDEO]I-Fusion says BidNet is the only Internet2-ready network in Africa and will soon be used to offer application service provision (ASP) services to external clients. And after telecommunications deregulation it may also allow the company to become a telecoms provider.
"There will be many opportunities after liberalisation," says CEO Ron Sackstein. "A telecommunications licence is one of the options we will be looking at."
[VIDEO]He says the next phase will see voice transported over the backbone, and phase three is to provide application service provider offerings. "It is a natural extension of the network we have just introduced."
The company says Bidvest group members will save between 20% and 40% on the cost of its voice calls at a "pessimistic estimate", and that ASP facilities will provide high-end applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) to smaller members that would otherwise not be able to afford it.
[VIDEO]The network is built around Cisco 7500 switches in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and Port Elizabeth, with 2Mbps links between these sites. Break-out points into the Internet are established at all these points, except Port Elizabeth, through peering with UUNet, with a dual firewall "demilitarised zone" security system protecting intranet integrity. The network is managed from a central control centre in Midrand.
BidNet uses multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) at the core transport layer, which I-Fusion says gives it a 30% speed improvement over traditional Internet protocol (IP) over asynchronous transmission mode (ATM) or frame relay. I-Fusion says UUNet was chosen as Internet service provider because of its MPLS expertise.
[VIDEO]"We have built the best we could buy with full fail-over and no bottlenecks," says group sales director Alec Stevens. "We are really proud of this network."
With a planned roll-out to 160 sites in the next three months, I-Fusion is enthusiastic about the possibilities BidNet presents. Combining the hardware and software buying power within Bidvest is one possibility, Stevens says. Free Internet is another.
"One of our future business opportunities is to provide free branded Internet," he says, mentioning the Absa free Internet access service as an example. "We have had such offers put to us and we are looking at doing something in that line."
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