Saving a packet on IP - South Africa cheers

22 September 2004 News

Cisco Systems has welcomed Minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri's recent announcement that as of 1 February 2005, value added network service (VANS) providers will be allowed to carry voice using any protocol. Mark Baptiste, Cisco's service provider manager for sub-Saharan Africa, comments on the announcement.

As the outsourcing market requirements continue to increase dramatically in South Africa, this announcement comes as a pleasant surprise to outsource customers as well as VANS, providing value added services. Customers have been requesting converged solutions from VANS for a number of years, but due to regulation this was not entirely possible.

This ruling will now allow VANS to provide customers with Triple Play Solutions providing converged voice, video and data solutions over a single infrastructure. This ultimately means Capex and Opex saving for the customer and VANS. Convergence will allow the reduction in network elements, multiple support agreements and software licences.

VANS now have an opportunity to offer lower-cost services using VOIP to customers requesting MPLS/VPN services and in this way create new sources of revenue. Concerns about the quality of VoIP services have always been a concern for customers. This may have been valid a few years ago, but the quality of public VoIP services is now often at, or near, that of public switched telephone network (PSTN) services. In remote regions, VoIP may even outperform traditional services. IP communications has evolved over the last few years and now VANS can provide customers with a converged packet based architecture delivering all the necessary quality of service required by voice and video applications.

This announcement is a major step forward for the South African ICT market and will clearly demonstrate South Africa's development in the ICT market to the rest of the world. We commend the Minister on making this decision and look forward to some more interesting announcements in October.

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