Southern African value retail chain Ackermans announced that it has selected Metacom to connect all 436 of its stores across its operations.

According to a press statement, Ackermans is using Metacom’s managed network and routers to provide every point of sale connectivity, even in remote locations.

Ackermans, established in 1916, has stores in countries such as South Africa, Namibia and Botswana. Ackermans is an operating subsidiary of investment and holding company Pepkor.

Conrad Reinke, IT executive at Pepkor said, “Most of our stores have ADSL and it is a good medium, but there is no guarantee of service; if it goes down, we have to wait in the queue for Telkom to fix it.”

“So we need a reliable failover to GSM to keep the store online. Most of our customers are now paying using credit cards, so we cannot afford to be offline for even a minute.”

Metacom’s routers have integrated ADSL and dual GSM SIM cards, a press statement from the two companies reads.

Metacom's managing director Réan van Niekerk explained: “We monitor every one of our devices around the clock to ensure that failover and recovery of service is seamless. Most of the time, our customers don’t even know when they have failed over from ADSL to 3G, or from one network to another.”.

Metacom operates in twelve countries throughout Africa.