Internet Solutions (IS), a leading converged communications services supplier, has grown its international bandwidth capabilities to 1.5Gbps, currently believed to be the highest capacity of any ISP in South Africa.
The company attributes the growth to be largely due to the burgeoning SME market.
Mark Strathmore, manager Access Solutions at IS, says this market sector is much more sensitive to changes in the telecommunications landscape than larger enterprises.
"There was a massive latent demand for small to medium-sized companies to do business with each other, and with corporates. The advent of broadband has made this possible in a relatively short time, and this, in turn, has forced larger enterprises to increase their bandwidth capacity to feed the SME demand, resulting in a spiral effect throughout their supply chain," says Strathmore.
"Recognising this demand, we have consistently grown to ensure that we stay ahead of the customer demand curve. Part of IS's commitment is to ensure we have enough international bandwidth at all times to provide customers with a speedy service. It's worth noting that our international bandwidth has doubled in the past 18 months and we anticipate a similar increase within the next 18-month period, if not sooner," says Strathmore.
Distributed over all the available cable mediums: SAT 3 / SAT 2 / SAFE, as well as satellite, the IS international Points of Presence (POPs) in New York, London, Hong Kong and Mauritius are all using this increased bandwidth. IS designed its international backbone so that client traffic can be routed over the shortest international path.
Tony Koutakis, general manager IS Network Services, says customers are benefiting from the increased availability.
"South Africa's economic growth has resulted in increased demand for bandwidth to and from the country," says Koutakis. "From a speed and cost-efficiency point of view, we are ensuring that clients who need to communicate to Europe get routed via London, via Hong Kong if their destination is Asia, and so on. Having numerous POPs and connectivity mediums gives us good redundancy in terms of re-routing client traffic over the available bandwidth. This means if there is an outage anywhere we can re-route traffic around it."
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Internet Solutions (IS) has transformed its business model and become a leading converged communications service provider in South Africa.
The business was founded on the principle of developing a robust infrastructure in order for corporates and other organisations to conduct e-business. Over the past 13 years 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 delivering solutions to meet the business needs of hundreds of customers, including the appointment by the State Information Technology Agency (SITA) to provide the national and provincial governments with Internet services.
During its 13-year life span, IS has evolved and grown its service offerings. Today, the company is the leading hosting service provider and security service provider in South Africa, as well as having significant market share in the virtual private network (VPN), mobile solutions, VOIS, African solutions and application service provider (ASP) space.
Internet Solutions, with an Empowerdex BBB rating, has earned an impressive collection of accolades, including eight First National Bank "Most Admired" awards, two Financial Mail "Best Company to Work For" awards, a place in the Top Unlisted Company Awards, first place in the ISP category for ComputerWeek Strategist's Best of Breed IT Awards, 2004, and eighth in the Top ICT Companies, 2005.
The company partners with major players such as Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, BT and AT&T and in 2002 was certified as a Cisco Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP), the first and only company outside of the US to be awarded this accolade.
For more, visit www.is.co.za.
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