Telkom bags R90m Sanren contract

By Paul Vecchiatto, ITWeb Cape Town correspondent

Cape Town, 31 Jul 2009

Telkom has snatched the hotly-contested South African National Research Network (Sanren) contract, to build a R90 million fibre-optic ring around the country, from Neotel.

Yesterday, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) announced Telkom had been appointed to supply the 10Gbps ring that will eventually stretch from Durban to Pretoria, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and East London.

Telkom and Neotel were the only bidders for the contract that was first publically announced by former science and technology minister Mosibudi Mangena last year. Mangena, who has since been replaced by Naledi Pandor, made a point of bemoaning the high bandwidth costs that were hampering research within the country.

Sanren is part of the national cyber infrastructure initiative funded by the Department of Science and Technology (DST). This deal concludes the negotiations process for the installation of the national backbone, undertaken on the DST's behalf by the CSIR's Meraka Institute.

The Tertiary Education Network (Tenet), which supplies connectivity to around 100 academic and research campuses, has been contracted to provide operational services. In terms of the contract, Telkom will build and maintain the network, and Sanren will have a 10-year indefeasible right of use, which means Sanren will have exclusive use of that capacity during that time.

Speeding up

Christiaan Kuun, Sanren's project manager, says Telkom was awarded the contract based mainly on two factors - price and technical solution.

“We followed the CSIR's rigorous procurement process that includes black economic empowerment score and company financials. However, it was mainly on price and technical solution that Telkom won,” he says.

Kuun says the advent of competition in the telecommunications industry meant both bidders had to put their thinking caps on and do their best.

He says the first part of the network, connecting Durban, Pretoria, Johannesburg and Cape Town, should be ready by 1 December and the rest by 1 February 2010, giving Sanren a fully redundant national ring.

With Tenet's connection to undersea cable Seacom completed, the entire network will potentially be one of the fastest in the country.

“The network will be available to all research and tertiary education institutions, and will facilitate research, exchange of documentation and video conferencing,” Kuun says.

Andrew Alston, Tenet chief technical officer, says the network will facilitate the distribution of data between all the points of presence on a seamless basis.

“Durban University of Technology, where the Tenet link to Seacom is situated, will be a point of presence on the network and so this makes it an extremely fast network for international and local bandwidth,” he says.

Meraka Institute centre manager Kagiso Chikane states: “Of immediate relevance is the importance of the national backbone in supporting SA's Square Kilometre Array bid to host the world's most powerful radio telescope.”