Pan-African telecoms provider Internet Solutions (IS) has made available point-to-point data network solutions that provide the “shortest path” between the UK and South Africa.

In a press statement, the company has announced the availability of two carrier grade services Ethernet Private Network (EPN) and Clear Channel, which provide direct access to IS’ undersea cable investments between South Africa and the UK.

IS uses the West African Cable System (WACS) undersea cable system as their primary transmission route with redundancy provided over the SEACOM undersea cable system.

Meanwhile, bandwidth speeds for EPN are available in 10Mbps increments starting at 10Mbps and increasing to 100Mbps. Clear Channel offers businesses a choice of five service speeds: STM-1, STM-4, 1Gbps, STM-16 and STM-64.

“These point-to-point solutions use the shortest path between the UK and SA providing the lowest available round-trip-times. This creates an optimal environment for businesses that want to drive collaboration enablement, for example through the use of video-conferencing, as well as companies where latency is paramount, such as stock trading,” says Brett Steingo, IS innovation and technology manager.

“In addition to security and reliability, a growing number of clients are starting to see low latency connectivity as crucial for businesses”, adds Steingo.

According to IS, both solutions are supported by a ‘Service Level Agreement’ (SLA) to ensure business uptime requirements are catered for.

Also, IS says that EPN is a layer 2 carrier ethernet managed service, which gives businesses the ability to control IP routing and security over the network.

Meanwhile, Clear Channel is a layer 1 managed optical transmission service, offering enterprises full control of their network over the transmission layer of the network.

“We have seen a large demand for layer 1 and layer 2 network connectivity coming into South Africa,” says Steingo.

“Both services provide global carriers with the ability to service clients that require a connection to South Africa via the UK. By using the EPN and Clear Channel networks that terminate in South Africa, global carriers can offer services that meet international standards,” he adds.

As part of the protected offering, the Clear Channel service enables two active linear paths over separate undersea cable paths that are managed by the client. The EPN protected service provides automatic failover management across the WACS and SEACOM undersea cable paths.

Internet Solutions is a wholly owned subsidiary of South African headquartered Dimension Data.