MTN's national long-distance fibre-optic network has seen its first milestone since the project's inception in 2009, with the first phase going live.
MTN announced yesterday that its national fibre-optic network, between Germiston and Durban, and in collaboration with Neotel and Vodacom, has made headway, with two major MTN nodes - New Germany and Durban - ready to go live on the mobile operator's network.
MTN CTO Kanagaratnam Lambotharan says 50% of the fibre floating and over 95% of the total route trenching has been completed. “[This is] a key milestone in our network footprint, which is designed and optimised to link major population centres and economic hubs, as well as interconnect with the international submarine cable landing sites.”
He says the two major nodes that have gone live are designed to accommodate significant capacity, “enabling MTN to cater for additional customers in the area, where incremental capacity can also be used to service corporate customers with dedicated hosted and converged solutions”.
Lambotharan says the network is designed to connect directly with MTN's international cable assets, allowing for tier one Internet backbone access and high quality connectivity with other MTN operations across Africa and the Middle East.
He says this allows for quality improvement, in that the network “substantially increases raw transmission capacity to carry national traffic”, thus enhancing network availability and resilience. In addition, says Lambotharan, the project will bolster service innovation as the network creates a robust infrastructure to support fixed-mobile converged services and the growing need of bandwidth-intensive content.
The remaining nodes, says MTN, will be connected within the upcoming months. “We look forward to the impact our newly live fibre-optic network will have on changing business needs and connectivity options, as we aim to assist in closing the current gap that exists regarding last-mile access,” concludes Lambotharan.
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