Telkom will manage the bandwidth of the new submarine cable system, known as SAT-3/WASC/SAFE, through a network administration application developed with Sybase's enterprise application development tool, PowerBuilder. The cable system, scheduled for commercial use by January 2002, provides global connectivity for African countries, and will offer a faster and more efficient communication channel between the continent and international markets.
It will add diversity for connections between Europe and Asia by the creation of a new West to East route, and will also meet the requirements of ever-increasing telephone traffic, multimedia services and the Internet. For the first time, a vast part of the Sub-Saharan African continent will have access to global optical fibre optic connectivity, a development that is set to play a key role in the economic development of the region.
The agreement for the construction and funding of SAT-3/WASC/SAFE was signed in June 1999 by a total of 40 telecommunications operators from 35 countries.
The cable system consists of two segments. The first - SAFE (South Africa - Far East) - links Malaysia and India in the east to South Africa via Mauritius and Reunion. The SAT-3/WASC (South Africa Trans-Atlantic - West Africa Submarine Cable) continues from South Africa to Portugal and Spain in Europe with landings at a number of west and southern African countries. The cable will span a distance of over 28,000 km and will cost US$630 million.
The project will have a total capacity of 120Gbits for the SAT-3/WASC segment and 80Gbits for the SAFE segment, equalling a maximum capacity of approximately seven million simultaneous telephone calls or 1.5 million 64 Kbit data channels.
Telkom IT project manager, Deon Visser, says that Telkom won a bid for the task of administrating the cable's bandwidth. "Telkom's task is to manage the capacity and to activate circuits between the access points," says Visser. "We chose PowerBuilder as the platform on which to build the administration software NetAd (Network Administrator) because of its openness and multi-platform capability, ease and speed of development, and its robust performance. Its support for Internet based component standards makes Web development easy, enabling the conversion of NetAd into a Web application in the future. This important feature will greatly simplify the management of SAT-3/WASC/SAFE bandwidth and will provide easy access to data and reports for all co-owners on the project.
Included in the administration will be the recording of general capacity sales and usage by occasional users, assignment of capacity between access points and the generation of work orders, technical routing information and management reports, to name a few.
"The development of NetAd has provided Telkom with a significant opportunity to promote South Africa's IT capabilities," says Visser. "We have used PowerBuilder as a development environment at our Pretoria and Bellville premises, and we are confident of its reliability, availability and scalability."
Visser notes that local availability of Sybase expertise was another factor in selecting PowerBuilder. Sybase SA provided training for Telkom developers and its commitment to the success of the project has ensured that Telkom was able to develop the solution on time and within budget.
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