The growing communications infrastructure trend in the US and other developed countries is towards MANs - Metropolitan Area Networks.
So says Val Moodley, Business Development Manager at OmniLink - SA`s largest private Quality-of-Service (QoS) VPN who points out that the trend is being driven by the fact that ATM-based MANs offer improved throughput, increased redundancy, and high speed at lower cost than conventional "long-haul" Wide Area Networks (WANs).
A MAN also allows for increased flexibility and easy connectivity for corporate users.
"A MAN is a robust, geographically proscribed network infrastructure which is shared by all businesses operating in the same region. The MAN is developed and maintained by a network service provider which sells bandwidth and services to local businesses in that region," she explains.
"In South Africa, for example, a MAN could be created by using fibre to connect the main business nodes in the greater Johannesburg metropolitan area - the CBD, Rosebank, Sandton and Midrand - across an ATM backbone. A similar MAN could be set up in Pretoria, or Cape Town or Durban.
"This would provide corporates located in these centres with high-speed, robust connectivity to their branches, suppliers and customers in the same metropolitan area. And because of the limited geographical reach of the MAN, it could be constructed to incorporate enormous redundancy.
"In effect, MAN users obtain all the benefits of Quality-of-Service, high-speed WAN technology and bandwidth right down to their remote branches because the cost of establishing and maintaining these expensive fibre networks is shared across all users," she adds.
According to Moodley, due to the regulatory situation in SA, Telkom is the only service provider with the legal right to develop MANs for use by the private sector.
"Because MANs could attract income currently generated for Telkom from its existing services - voice and diginet for data - it`s unlikely to provide a MAN for the foreseeable future.
"The appointment of a second Telco licencee in SA won`t have much impact in this arena in the short-term. A new SA Telco will find it difficult to install sufficient fibre to create MANs even after Telkom`s period of exclusivity expires because of the high cost of the infrastructure and the time required to roll it out.
"This means SA is unlikely to benefit from the technological advances offered by MANs for at least the next five to 10 years," Moodley concludes.
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