MTN Business is offering its Namibian customers wide area data services, to minimise the amount of bandwidth used by their companies.
Namibia arguably has the most expensive bandwidth in Africa, since all of its bandwidth is sourced from Johannesburg or Cape Town, says MTN Business Namibia country manager Manfred Engling. A 65% to 95% reduction in utilisation would, therefore, be highly beneficial to businesses, he notes.
WAN optimisation is the improvement and acceleration of application performance across a business's wide-area network (WAN). It involves the installation of a device that cuts down the amount of bandwidth used to conduct transaction data exchange.
MTN Business is using a solution provided by Riverbed that also includes wide area file services, quality-of-service, and traffic shaping and Web caching.
Engling says: “This means that, instead of addressing the single causes of poor application performance over the WAN individually, companies can tackle all of the issues that affect application performance over the WAN in one shot, improving the throughput of applications that organisations rely on everyday - including file sharing, e-mail, backup, SSL, document management systems, and IT tools, as well as ERP and CRM solutions.”
According to Engling, many Namibian IT companies lack the skills to maintain such a device and its software, which is why he believes having a managed solution through a company like MTN is necessary.
It already operates as a tier one Internet service provider in Namibia, utilising its own bandwidth, cable and backbone. MTN Business also has support skills on site, so there is no need for companies to rely on support from head offices in SA.
Engling adds: “Instead of investing in the technology, companies can lease the devices from MTN Business on a subscription basis as part of the overall service.”
The offering will cost companies between R35 and R40 per user per month. However, Engling cautions clients to weigh up the cost with the savings in bandwidth and productivity the service will provide.
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