Johannesburg, 24 Feb 2011
Through the recent successful implementation of its Broadband Infrastructure Project, the City of Cape Town has invested in its own telecommunications infrastructure, to both reduce costs and contribute towards the economic growth of Cape Town.
The City of Cape Town has a management objective to contribute towards the economic growth of Cape Town through the provision of neutral telecommunications infrastructure.
Its requirements included the laying of network optic fibre cables across Cape Town, with sufficient capacity to meet the City's current and future needs, thereby ensuring that the City has access to low-cost broadband to support the delivery of municipal services, as well as making spare capacity available to third-party network users.
In order to fulfil this objective, a system was required to properly plan, build, manage and maintain the network infrastructure. This would have been impossible without readily available, up-to-date network inventory data.
Through an open tender process, the City of Cape Town decided on the GE Smallworld Physical Network Inventory (PNI) product, supplied by Powertech IST Data, a Value Added Reseller for GE Smallworld in southern Africa. The tender was awarded on the basis of the reasonable price, functionality and flexibility of the solution.
“The fibre network has an unusually complex architecture, making detailed planning and inventory management crucial. After evaluating all competitive offerings, it became clear that GE Smallworld PNI is the only product on the market that can meet all the demands of the City's telecoms planning and construction department,” says Sybrand Brink, the City's Fibre Network Architect.
The GE Smallworld PNI solution will support the optic fibre expansion and management objective of the City of Cape Town through enabling effective controls, and will configure and manage an optical network infrastructure spread over a large geographic area that customers will use to provide telecommunications services.
As the City of Cape Town needed a planning tool, it was crucial that a very strong design manager application be available that could help the City of Cape Town manage the project life cycle from planning through to construction, all the way to accepting new infrastructure into the as-built network. Powertech IST Data extensively customised the PNI design manager to satisfy the City of Cape Town requirements.
It was also important to be able to configure and fix end-to-end circuits across the network, which may run on many different cables. For this the City of Cape Town now uses the Globema Physical Route Manager.
The primary objective of the Broadband Infrastructure Project is to provide the City of Cape Town with an enduring telecommunications infrastructure for its own use, and second to do this, in a way that recovers costs and contributes towards the economic growth of Cape Town.
This has involved laying a network of optic fibre cables across Cape Town, with sufficient capacity to meet the City's current and future needs, thereby ensuring that the City has access to low-cost broadband to support the delivery of municipal services.
The first phase of the project involved installing a core network of optic fibre cable that will be initially used to directly connect 65 of 550 municipal buildings, including most of the key administrative buildings. This infrastructure has been planned to eventually cover the entire metropolitan area.
One-hundred-and-seventy-one kilometres of core optic fibre cable has initially been installed using the traditional three-tier approach of installing core, local and access cables. Blown fibre technology is used throughout, utilising both the mini-duct technology with typical cable sizes of 72 strands, as well as micro-duct technology for the access layer (12 fibres in a 1.4mm cable).
Five fully equipped data centres were constructed with a combined capacity of 270 server racks for hosting transmission equipment.
“The GE Smallworld PNI solution will support the accurate modelling of network infrastructure and equipment, and will provide a powerful database for all the network data, supporting network planning, design, engineering and keeping record of as-built changes in the network. It is also network focused and aims to optimise the network life cycle management. However, in the case of City of Cape Town, it was necessary to be customer aware and to manage the life cycle of the optical paths that are provided to customers, says Francois Blignaut, Project Manager for Powertech IST Data.
“The transaction also represents significant progress in the method and timelines in which similar projects in this market segment are delivered. It was a long distance project in South Africa with the team based in two parts of the world,” says Blignaut.
“It has been a pleasure to work with the Powertech IST Data personnel. They always delivered what they promised, on time and within budget and have made a complex implementation painless. The City of Cape Town always gets very good help and support and will recommend Powertech IST Data to anyone as a sterling example of professionalism and competence,” commented Brink.
This was the first Greenfields PNI implementation in South Africa finished on time and within budget, but more importantly, delivering a quality solution with immediate benefits for the customer who uses the system every day.
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