ICT readiness for 2010 at an advanced state
Most of the ICT requirements for the 2010 Fifa World Cup will be met by the time the Confederations Cup kicks-off in June this year.
Four 2010 venues - namely, Loftus Versfeld (Pretoria), Coca-Cola Park (Johannesburg), Royal Bafokeng (Rustenburg) and Free State's Bloemfontein Stadium - will be in use for this year's Confederations Cup.
"However, in meeting the network requirements for the Confed Cup we've actually been working towards the 2010 requirements simultaneously. Since our network is a meshed one, we're striving to ensure that all 11 World Cup venues will be ready. Obviously, though, our focus at this stage is on the venues that have been designated for the Confederations Cup," stated Thami Magazi, Telkom's Group Executive for Multi-National Customers.
He explained that there are two Telkom rooms, or hubs, within each stadium. "In effect, these carrier rooms are extensions of Telkom's exchanges," added Magazi.
He emphasised that co-operation among all 2010 partners has been "extremely impressive".
"The degree of co-operation among all the leading players in the South African ICT market augurs very favourably for the fulfilment of all government guarantees with strict adherence to Fifa's standards. For example, at one of the Confed Cup stadia, the Telkom room was not accepted because the air-conditioning was not installed according to specification. This situation has now been corrected, though," stated Magazi.
The telecommunications solution that has been defined and refined by Telkom provides for 99.99% availability with no single point of failure. Any downtime - for maintenance purposes, for example - will be planned and, therefore, should not occur during a live broadcast.
"Essentially, our solution sees the deployment of identical infrastructure at all the 2010 stadia as this universal services provisioning infrastructure optimises service delivery, maintenance and operations processes," explained Magazi.
All service provisioning will be monitored from Telkom's highly vaunted National Network Operations Centre (NNOC). "This will make possible the early detection of faults or intrusions. In fact, the security of our network is world-class," said Magazi.
Although the national layer of the Telkom network allows for ATNS (Automatic Transfer Network Switching) thereby ensuring a built-in redundancy or back-up, the second Telkom hub within each stadium drastically reduces the possibility of service interruptions.
To further ensure optimal efficiencies, Telkom has partnered with Media Broadcast to meet video services requirements.
"The technical demonstration of this latter capability has already been completed. All in all, I can confidently state that we're ready to make our nation proud because Telkom has teamed up to make 2010 a resounding success," concluded Magazi.