Johannesburg, 13 Mar 2008
Neotel has addressed a recent series of outages on Tenet's network. The incidents included a fibre connector failure, which led to a complete service failure, as well as an overnight service failure on 6/7 March and routing instability on 11 March. The latter, Neotel says, was caused by Tenet giving it an incorrect IP address.
Neotel and Internet Solutions (IS) took over the provision of a connectivity solution to the Tertiary Education Network (Tenet) on 15 February, after it was awarded the deal for the institution's GEN3 network last year.
Telkom had been supplying connectivity to the institution since 2001, in terms of two contracts, the second of which expired on 31 December.
Says Tenet CEO Duncan Martin: "With this latest change of provider, we really had only three months. The first institutions were switched over on 1 March. We knew that from the beginning and knew when we started planning mid last year that if we did not re-appoint Telkom, it was obliged to co-operate for only three months.
"It's been a great rush, and both providers have been really impressive in terms of the effort they have put in doing the build, and reaching the sites that they can (Neotel is rolling out links from scratch). In the case of Neotel, they have been very good with letting us know which sites they would not be able to reach [by switchover]. Overall, we have been very pleased."
Says Neotel marketing manager Elise Roscoe: "It is important to note that Tenet made a decision to purchase a non-redundancy network with a 99% SLA (as opposed to a 99.8% SLA). In other words, they only have one link into the PoP. The risks were explained to the customer at the outset and we tried to encourage them to purchase a higher SLA with redundancy, but they chose not to. We are chatting to them again to see if we can revise their SLA with a redundancy option."
Telkom is currently supplying connectivity to the Tenet sites Neotel has not yet been able to reach on a month-to-month basis. According to Roscoe, 12 of these 40 sites are scheduled to be switched over by the end of March and the rest will be done thereafter.
"It's a new thing to have collaboration between two major providers like Neotel and IS," notes Martin. "It's new for them and it's new for us to have two providers. It has gone well and the project management has been good. So the problems reported are not really problems with cutovers, they are operational problems within Neotel's network.
"I'm not dismayed, I'm not angry, we're working closely with Neotel, we're still confident it's going to be right. We're convinced we'll be good for them and them for us. It's a new network, the architecture suits us, and the network has the capacity and design to cope with our destination as a Gigabit network as well."
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