Vodacom Business to connect Africa with Carrier Ethernet

Vodacom Business is pushing its Carrier Ethernet and Managed Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) solution to connect African countries.

The company says it wants the continent to seize new digital opportunities across its extensive footprint of 47 countries on the African continent.

According to Vodacom Business, the business landscape is ever-changing, and competitive barriers are disappearing, with speed and agility to market established as critical components in the digital world.

It notes that Carrier Ethernet and Managed DIA services work seamlessly alongside other converged fixed and mobile connectivity services to give organisations a “future-ready network” solution.

Vodacom Business managed DIA is an Internet access service that connects enterprises directly to the global Internet Protocol (IP) backbone.

The service comes with symmetric access capabilities (the same upload and download bandwidth) and dedicated bandwidth, rather than shared bandwidth

It is widely used for Web site connectivity, business Internet use, and connecting remote or third-party sites.

However, the company did not disclose how much it is investing in these services.

In an e-mail interview with ITWeb, Wale Odeyemi, executive head of strategic marketing at Vodacom Business Africa, says the “new normal” required that workforces had to be redeployed in a hybrid working fashion.

He notes that workloads were redistributed into hybrid clouds, with data and even mission-critical applications migrated at scale.

“This placed a lot of pressure on networks, workforce productivity and the bottom line of businesses before they were able to adapt to the impacts of the global health crisis,” says Odeyemi.

“Smart buying and contracting became commonplace as CIOs grappled not only with rightsizing to control ICT costs, but also wisely investing in more fit-for-purpose capabilities to enable them to scale elastically, to better adapt and thrive in a post-pandemic era.”

Odeyemi points out that the company’s global IP-VPN backbone with points-of-presence (POPs) across Vodacom’s footprint provides optimal routes, with direct interconnects into local and international Internet exchange points, for local, regional or inter-continental connectivity between business branches and hybrid clouds.

He explains the managed DIA international gateways are deployed across the company’s African POPs, while the Carrier Ethernet gateways are deployed into global and Pan-Africa POPs.

“The network underlay utilises a range of high-capacity cross-border terrestrial and subsea cable systems across the east and west coasts of Africa, thereby providing a resilient ring across the continent into Europe, Asia and the Americas.”

To drive the product on the African continent, Vodacom Business is banking on its channel partners.

Says Odeyemi: “Across our footprint, our channel partners range from some of the largest in-country Internet service providers, to regional and global enterprise aggregators. These partners trust us to deliver on their brand promise to their enterprise business end clients.

“Vodacom Business Africa enables multinational enterprises to internationalise their operations across Africa. As a wholesale continental aggregator, we deliver business connectivity and digital solutions at scale across 47 African markets and 63 globally, via our extensive IP VPN network on five continents. Our routes to market leverage a rich channel partner ecosystem of global, regional and local ICT service providers.”