Internet Solutions (IS), a leading converged communications services provider, has signed interconnect agreements with all of the country's incumbent mobile and fixed-line telecommunications companies, and now has live interconnects in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban.
Agreements include MTN, Vodacom, Cell C and Telkom, as well as several VANs such as Storm, Vox and M-Web. This makes the on-net community a reality.
Interconnection agreements are standard procedure for service providers worldwide to provide their customers with the fastest, most cost-effective and most direct connections across multiple providers. This means the end-user benefits by IS exchanging calls directly with other telecoms providers, using local links and agreed interconnection tariffs - critical to providing credible commercial alternatives.
"Some of our corporate customers want a higher quality for their voice services and understand the cost implications," says Greg Hatfield, manager, VOIS Solutions at IS. "These interconnect agreements mean we can offer them differentiated solutions - a SIM-based service to give them maximum savings with a centralised leased cost routing (LCR) offering, and the higher-priced interconnect solution. The interconnect solution offers similar cellular termination quality to using the PSTN, which no SIM-based LCR solution can claim to do, but is still significantly cheaper."
Hatfield concluded by indicating that IS has visibility of demand that would justify interconnects in the next tier of major cities - Pretoria, Port Elizabeth and Bloemfontein - the Pretoria interconnect with Telkom is already under way.
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Internet Solutions (IS), is Africa's leading new age telco, offering end-to-end converged communication solutions to its clients. The people at IS are passionate about constantly innovating and delivering solutions and services that are relevant and critical to their customers. These services are built on a world-class, secure, resilient infrastructure, delivered according to global best practices and effected in partnership with the world's leading technology vendors. It is through these services and solutions that IS creates a competitive edge for its customers' communication needs, and promotes sustainable business growth.
The business was founded in 1992 on the principle of developing a robust infrastructure in order for corporates and other organisations to communicate. Since then, IS has established itself as a leader in this space, attracting over 80% of South Africa's top businesses as clients. From listed companies to non-governmental organisations, local and national government and smaller companies, IS is enabling and evolving communications to meet the business needs of thousands of customers.
The company enjoys partnerships with major global players such as Cisco and Microsoft and holds Microsoft Gold Certification in the Hosting specialisation for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (Hosted Exchange and SharePoint) and Managed Hosting Solutions - the first South African company to achieve this accreditation, and was the first company outside of the US to be certified as a Cisco Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP).
Today the company enjoys a leadership position as it delivers services, including: Hosting, Access, Security Solutions, Virtual Private Network (VPN), Mobile Solutions, VOIS, African Solutions, Broadband, and Application Services (ASP). Recent growth in the African economy has resulted in IS spreading its services across all parts of the continent as clients demand reliable and robust networking connectivity in the African market.
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