Skycall, a leading VOIP and data specialist, has announced that it has now opened branches in Polokwane and KwaZulu-Natal - with Cape Town and Pretoria to follow - and is embarking on a substantial recruitment drive not only for resellers for the various regions, but for internal staff to man their new offices. This includes reseller augmentation for its Pretoria-based head office.
This is at a time when companies are mostly either retrenching or placing a freeze on hiring new staff members. The channel market is also said to be in disarray and battling in a tight recessionary market.
“We are on a serous expansion trail,” said Skycall operations director, Pieter Botha. “We see the Internet and VOIP, in particular, as a high growth industry and we are placing ourselves in a position to become one of the major players within the next three to five years in the VOIP and data market.”
He said the company's turnover is doubling every month. “We are now in a position to grow our brand and our market penetration - but we will be doing this organically,” he said.
The company has also adjusted its call rates downwards to ensure it stays competitive and says it offers the best “revenue module to resellers” in the VOIP marketplace currently.
“We are now in a position to fast-track our branch roll-out to provide better regional support to our growing customer base. Also, having received our ICASA national network licence, we felt the time is now ready to start pushing our expansion.”
The company expects to roll out 15 branches by the end of 2010.
Internet is growing in SA
Interestingly, during 2008 the Internet user base in SA has seen its highest growth since 2001, increasing by 12.5% to 4.5 million. This is one of the key findings of research conducted by World Wide Worx, under the banner of the Internet Access in South Africa study.
The study was also endorsed by the Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) of South Africa.
The research shows that growth has resulted largely due to the dramatic take-on of broadband offerings by small businesses, which alone accounted for half of the growth in the market, mainly through connecting office staff to their ADSL links. Simultaneously, the market as a whole has seen a continued dramatic shift from dial-up connections to broadband, with growth in both ADSL and 3G at more than 50%.
Where it comes to communications solutions, Skycall firmly believes VOIP should not just be considered as a cheaper alternative, but users should rather take a long and hard look at the total benefits this technology offers the end-user. For example, Skycall is able to deliver data and voice solutions where no ADSL is available. It even offers VOIP communications via 3G connections - one of the few in the country to do so.
“There is a growing and buoyant demand for VOIP,” Botha added. “And this is not going to change. But what one has to be cognisant of is quality delivery. Something that, unfortunately, does not always happen - and this gives the industry a bad name.”
Moreover, having had experience in building WiFi Networks, Skycall does not recommend the use of VOIP over WiFi networks (for quality of service reasons) and until such time wireless spectrum is properly regulated.
In his World Wide Worx report, Arthur Goldstuck said: “We are seeing a broadband culture emerging in South Africa, held back only by the restrictions still placed on data capacity. These should start becoming a non-issue from the middle of 2009, as the first of the major new undersea cables enters operation. At that point, dial-up will effectively be dead as a connectivity option - it is more expensive, and utterly inappropriate to the changing nature of the Internet.
“Once everyone who is connected is on broadband or high-speed networks, the Internet will come into its own as an environment for business collaboration and personal interaction.”
The report further states that the Seacom undersea cable, commissioned mainly by new market entrant Neotel, will increase South Africa's international bandwidth 40-fold, and will mark the beginning of what World Wide Worx describes as “a seismic shift in the Internet landscape in Africa”.
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