Kanagaratnam Lambotharan

MTN’s national long-distance fibre-optic network has seen its first milestone since the project’s inception in 2009, with the first phase going live.

MTN announced that its national fibre-optic network, between Germiston and Durban, and in collaboration with Neotel and Vodacom, has made headway, with two major MTN nodes – New Germany and Durban – ready to go live on the mobile operator’s network.

MTN CTO Kanagaratnam Lambotharan says 50% of the fibre floating and over 95% of the total route trenching has been completed. “[This is] a key milestone in our network footprint, which is designed and optimised to link major population centres and economic hubs, as well as interconnect with the international submarine cable landing sites.”

He says the two major nodes that have gone live are designed to accommodate significant capacity, “enabling MTN to cater for additional customers in the area, where incremental capacity can also be used to service corporate customers with dedicated hosted and converged solutions”.

MTN says the project, started two years ago, marks one of the largest collaborations in the South African telecommunications industry, covering 5 000km and connecting major city centres across SA. “This initial route plays a significant role in MTN’s goals to take Africa to the world and bring the world to Africa by linking up with the Eassy undersea cable on the East coast.”

Lambotharan says the network is designed to connect directly with MTN’s international cable assets, allowing for tier one Internet backbone access and high quality connectivity with other MTN operations across Africa and the Middle East.

He says this allows for quality improvement, in that the network “substantially increases raw transmission capacity to carry national traffic”, thus enhancing network availability and resilience. In addition, says Lambotharan, the project will bolster service innovation as the network creates a robust infrastructure to support fixed-mobile converged services and the growing need of bandwidth-intensive content.