29 March 2007
Internet Solutions (IS), a leading converged communications services supplier, has grown its international bandwidth capabilities to 1.5 Gbps, currently believed to be the highest capacity of any ISP in South Africa. They attribute the growth to be largely due to the burgeoning SME market. Mark Strathmore, manager Access Solutions at IS, says this market sector is much more sensitive to changes in the telecommunications landscape than larger enterprises.
“There was a massive latent demand for small to medium sized companies to do business with each other, and with corporates. The advent of broadband has made this possible in a relatively short time, and this, in turn, has forced larger enterprises to increase their bandwidth capacity to feed the SME demand, resulting in a spiral effect throughout their supply chain,” says Strathmore.
“Recognising this demand, we have consistently grown to ensure that we stay ahead of the customer demand curve. Part of IS’ commitment is to ensure we have enough international bandwidth at all times to provide customers with a speedy service. It’s worth noting that our international bandwidth has doubled in the past 18 months and we anticipate a similar increase within the next 18 month period, if not sooner,” says Strathmore.
Distributed over all the available cable mediums: SAT 3 / SAT 2 / SAFE, as well as satellite, the IS international Points of Presence (POPs) in New York, London, Hong Kong and Mauritius are all using this increased bandwidth. IS designed their international backbone so that client traffic can be routed over the shortest international path.
Tony Koutakis, general manager IS Network Services, says their customers are benefiting from the increased availability.
“South Africa’s economic growth has resulted in increased demand for bandwidth to and from the country,” says Koutakis. “From a speed and cost efficiency point of view we are ensuring that clients who need to communicate to Europe get routed via London, via Hong Kong if their destination is Asia, and so on. Having numerous POPs and connectivity mediums gives us good redundancy in terms of re-routing client traffic over the available bandwidth. This means if there is an outage anywhere we can re-route traffic around it.”
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