Neotel unveils offerings

By Damaria Senne for Neotel
Johannesburg, 01 Sep 2006

Neotel, SA`s second national fixed-line operator, introduced its wholesale services in Kyalami yesterday.

The offerings are aimed at existing retail providers, such as mobile network providers, value-added network service (VANS) providers and regional telecoms operators in the southern African sub-continent. The services promise some operators a fundamental shift in the way they do business, says Sedumo Mohapi, Neotel`s senior manager of products and solutions.

Neotel has formed strategic partnerships with five undersea cable operators. By leveraging the telecoms network of shareholder VSNL International, Neotel brings the core of the Internet to SA for the first time, he says. VSNL International is also a partner in the SAT3 undersea cable, which many ICT stakeholders have complained is too expensive when accessed through Telkom.

Neotel`s wholesale voice services will include carrying international calls to more than 400 of its international partners, and facilitating calls from almost 200 countries, he notes. Neotel has also launched its IP transit services, which will offer wholesale Internet connectivity for local Internet service providers, he says.

CEO Ajay Pandey says Neotel has not set a specific target, as Telkom had previously announced it expects to lose up to 15% of its market share.

More to come

Neotel will follow up the launch of its wholesale services with national connectivity services to telecoms operators and large enterprise customers by the end of 2006, he says. These services will cater for the large nation-wide bandwidth requirements of organisations and are expected to have a funnel-down effect for the end-users as well, Pandey notes.

Neotel will also increase its portfolio of enterprise voice and data services by the end of February 2007.

Residential customers and small and medium enterprises will, however, have to wait longer to access Neotel`s services, as initial services will only be made available by the second quarter of 2007, in metro areas.

Getting it right

Storm joint-CEO Tim Parsonson commends Neotel for beginning with a wholesale offering. This will give it a chance to focus on fewer customers and get its network and delivery right, he says. It also outsources customer management to operators such as VANS that are already in the business, he says.

Parsonson also praises Neotel for its plan to offer services on the last mile through the infrastructure it acquired from state-owned enterprises Transtel and Eskom. This area has been least contested, with Telkom as the only supplier, he says.

He is, however, concerned that Neotel is also targeting the competitive international and data services arena. "I think it`s going to be difficult to compete on service quality, and what the market needs is competition in terms of price," he says.

Communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri also unveiled Neotel`s Web site during yesterday`s event.