Convergence Partners Chairman, Andile Ngcaba, was named as TechCentral’s newsmaker of 2011 for his significant impact on South Africa’s technology sector over the past 12 months, topping an impressive list consisting of Pieter Uys, Mamodupi Mohlala, Karel Pienaar, Robert Gumede, Roy Padayachie, Lars Reichelt, Michael Jordaan, Pinky Moholi and Mteto Nyati.

According to TechCentral: “Through his Convergence Partners investment vehicle, Ngcaba launched a US$250m satellite with Intelsat (after a false start) and signed a multibillion-rand deal to build a national fibre network with Cell C and Dimension Data’s Internet Solutions.

“Ngcaba has taken to the business world like a proverbial duck to water. Executive chairman of Dimension Data Middle East and Africa, in which he also holds a sizeable investment through Convergence Partners, Ngcaba is certainly prepared to put his money where his mouth is.”

“Despite his involvement in the launch of the Intelsat New Dawn satellite and FibreCo’s plans to deploy a R5bn national fibre network consisting of up to 14 000km of fibre infrastructure, Ngcaba has stayed largely out of the media spotlight in 2011. But we’ve been tracking his activities closely and we think he’s worthy of the accolade of newsmaker of the year.”

Read more here: http://www.techcentral.co.za/sa-newsmakers-of-the-year-the-top-five/28200/

Howard Early, COO of Plessey, explains the growing need for specialist infrastructure management in the fast-changing telco world.

In the early days of telecoms, it was taken for granted that the telco would build, operate and maintain its own infrastructure. Now, while many telcos do still operate their own infrastructure, fewer actually build it, and many outsource the maintenance of it.

In the new world of converged communications, where telcos and service providers have their hands full creating, marketing and delivering products and services to their customers, building, operating and maintaining infrastructure is even less core to their business.

Read more here! Itweb.co.za

Co-author of Convergence Partners’ first research report, Russell Southwood of Balancing Act, reports back on the optimism surrounding the ICT sector during the 14^th annual AfricaCom conference held in Cape Town in November 2011.

Russell reported that AfricaCom, expanded this year to include Enterprise ICT and Africast streams, has become a necessary meeting place for the role-players in the industry. He identified the following key threads at the conference:

• International bandwidth growth. The primary drivers for all this growth are mobile internet and WiMAX;

• ACE making steady progress, although it has not yet funded its South Africa leg. WIOCC has also signed an agreement with WACS to give it a west coast redundancy route;

• The steady growth of national and cross-border terrestrial fibre although price and access still remain issues;

• Liquid Telecom’s and other providers network stretches north, but gaps;

• Satellite operators seem to have weathered the fibre storm, by using broadcasting to fill the gap;

• Yahsat is set to launch its new products early next year which promises to “shake the market up.” 03B is still looking at a 2013 launch date but its business case seems increasingly shaky;

• Mobile content gets more and more interesting;

• Australia’s biNU mobile have a feature phone content platform that has over 2 million users globally;

• OnMobile from India has seen sales in Africa ahead of expectations. Looking to tapi into the independent music labels;

• A steady trickle of VOD content offerings were on display, including LogiWays and Jamii;

• Mobile payment breakthrough still awaited, but lots of offerings tied to a single operator and/or financial institution;

• Nigeria seems to be leading the way with a slightly more open process of platforms getting to market e.g. Paga in Nigeria and Mobipay in Tanzania.

Balancing Act Africa

Convergence Partners investee company, Seacom has signed a master services agreement with Telecomunicações de Moçambique (TDM), the leading telecommunications service provider in Mozambique, which gives it access to the largest and most distributed fibre optic network in Mozambique as well as a diverse route into Zimbabwe and additional border presence into Malawi and South Africa.

Through this agreement, customers in Zimbabwe are able to interconnect to the Seacom system in Maputo via Mutare. This additional route through Mozambique complements Seacom’s existing route through South Africa via Beit Bridge and provides Zimbabwean customers with resiliency and redundancy.

Brian Herlihy, Seacom CEO, comments: “This agreement with TDM demonstrates our commitment to partner with established players to improve the range of service to customers while continuously expanding the reach of Seacom’s low cost services into land-locked countries across the region.”

Currently, more than a dozen countries across the African continent have access to Seacom’s low cost products and services via its extended network.

Article in Seacom website

Article in ItOnline

Dimension Data subsidiary Plessey has won a R20m contract to install and maintain 11 regeneration sites on Dark Fibre Africa’s fibre cable linking Empangeni on the KwaZulu-Natal north coast and Pretoria in Gauteng.

Plessey chief operating officer Howard Earley says the sites will house equipment that will pick up any data on the fibre and rebroadcast it using a booster to make sure that data degradation doesn’t occur.

“The fibre is more than 400km long. If you just pump data down the line, you will get a garbled mess out the other end. But the regeneration sites will basically boost the data so what you put in, you get out at the end,” he says.

The sites will be hosted at Bronkhorstspruit, Middelburg, Hendrina, Ermelo, Panbult, Piet Retief, Paulpietersburg, Vryheid, Zulu Rock, Melmoth and Empangeni.

Earley says Plessey will build the sites, install and maintain the equipment, and ensure that containers are air-conditioned and are properly secured.

The cable system carries traffic from the Seacom submarine cable to Gauteng.

Each site will have mains power, a back-up generator and battery back-up facilities, and the company says the sites should have 99,95% uptime.

Plessey will monitor each site from its network operations centre in Midrand and will also station technicians along the route to carry out preventative maintenance and respond to any incidents.

Earley says the company has a 15-year contract with Dark Fibre Africa to provide space and power within each of the 11 sites.

See attached TechCentral Article

Plessey Press Release

NOC pictures

In the latest edition of Communications Africa Magazine, the technical and commercial benefits of geostationary communications satellites are assessed, contrasting them to both the failed high profile experimental satellite technologies of the previous decade, as well as to other communications technologies in Africa, notably fibre, as it arrives on the continent’s shores in abundance. In particular profiling the New Dawn satellite.

See attached article

TechCentral, leading online technology website, has named Seacom President, Brian Herlihy as “the obvious choice” for Newsmaker of the Year for 2009. Seacom went live in July 2009 and has already resulted in dramatic price reductions and new investments in terrestrial infrastructure in East Africa.

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